day one design

Strawbale Wall at the Boom Festival

2010-12-01T13:55:14-08:00

Welcome everyone, to Boom! It's an art-based psytrance music festival located in the desert of eastern Portugal. It happens every other year and they are really making an effort to have all of the structures as natural and earth-conscious as we can make it. I'm here to play with bamboo as much as possible and build a strawbale wall around a movie screen/workshop area that needed some added sound isolation. I didn't know exactly what I was getting in to when I arrived, but it turned out great, and there's a lot of photos here to give you a glimpse at my adventure. I brought along dear friends, Sebastian, Julia and Fezzo to help make it happen. Dozens of other bamboo builders and volunteers from around the world learn to get in the mud and see what we can do with all this clay, sand and straw. we start with an outline of the wall created by some locally grown bamboo poles I decide to use the bamboo framework as external pinning and stack the bales into columns between them extensive staking with hand carved bamboo splits help toe nail each bale to the next. Thanks to Danny Pando for making all those beautiful stakes and doing it fast enough to keep up with the flow. I make a really fancy tying system to hold the external framework together but only reveal a beautiful simple lash once plastered. My fearless friends, Sebastian and Ilima, help me get the bales up to 14 courses high! Lots of hammering and balancing involved on this one. We also spend a few days shaving the corners of the bales and shaping the form as much as possible. Then comes the mud The first coat over the bales is a basic clay slip Our head honcho and bamboo guru, Gerard, gets into it! working all together we cover 300 bales in about 2 days! Then, we start a finish plaster mix in two huge pits lined with old billboard material and yes, the most fun and efficient way to mix, is to just dive right in! besides, getting coated in mud helps protect us from the scorching sun! diving the edges up to the bamboo provides a nice place for a cold joint and gives each volunteer a sense of accomplishment, one section at a time. plus the juxtaposition of mud and bamboo is so beautiful! already a great place for our snack and juice break, i will never forget those white cheese sandwiches! we keep plastering even through the night Julia works on a sculptural bench it turns out just lovely check out the site-found crystal that we integrate into it! on the back side of the wall, we build shelves for the 'marketplace' i create a nest to hide the joint between the edging branches meanwhile, I help make this special component that will support the fanning shade sails and a shade structure starts to go up around the theater area we spend an entire night spreading out ten dump truck loads of sand throughout the arena in use! After the festival, we take down the sails, but get to leave the wall standing. It's going to be used as a drive in movie theather for the local community. long distance aerial shot from my campsite hard work pays off! photo credits: Julia Bonneheim & Erica Ann

the Regi

2010-12-01T00:44:04-08:00

This little structure was a great synthesis of bamboo and mud I create a canya wattle with bamboo splits for bracing Then, pile up some strawbales and large rocks for seating starting to mud over the canya wattle with a 'heavy clay-straw' mix my crew are experts by now two walls bamboo panels and two walls earthen benches inside is the main DJ and control booth for the two stages in the Drop a great spot to rest and neat to see it endure some heavy use during the festival

Other Great Projects at Boom

2010-11-30T15:34:37-08:00

A wonderful community kitchen. It's a cob oven and rocket stove style grills all in one! Plaster texture detail on the oven A bamboo framed dream catcher portal to the Drop A ferrocement greywater reclaimation system with live plants for on-site water treatment A beautiful mosaic dragon, in process rotating driftwood sculpture Canya is an amazing sculptural framing material Essentially, sugar cane stalks, that grow rampant all along the northern mediterrean coast. Bundled in groups of 30 or so, spliced to any desired length and then built up like a basket. Truly inspiring to me!

Village Building Convergence 2010

2010-11-11T00:07:39-08:00

Welcome to the Village Building Convergence, a true gem about Portland and one of my personal favorite things about the city. Each year, an organization called City Repair puts on a ten-day festival of community building and place-making, often using natural construction to do so. It's wonderful, 25 sites all across the city welcomed community members to join in playing in the mud while creating beautiful meaningful relationships and simple projects along the way. I was honored to be one of their guest instructors this year and participate in many of the activities throughout the week. A cob bench from a previous year, being wholesomely enjoyed An intersection painting, brings neighbors together in the street and helps slow down traffic with it's thoughtful design. There are many of these throughout Portland, how many have you seen? A cat palace, built last year and led by my dear friend Eva Miller, and this year she's building a Chicken Palace. What lucky animals in the urban place! She also led the renovation of the City's first legal Light Clay-Straw Retrofit. And it came out great! Here's a detail picture of the wall section for all you builder nerds My awesome new friend Fezzo who was my housemate for the week. and his bright red kilt that we dyed together mid-week. This project was my favorite--an outdoor classroom at Madison High School. The timberframe and main cob walls had been built the previous year. Now we are adding strawbale ampitheater style seating and some bamboo and sculptural cob. I have never seen as enthusiastic cobbers as here! What a huge batch! Rachel gets into it Beautiful lime finishes from the prior year Wetting down the top of the wall so that we can add to it this year. An amazing attribute of natural construction, that it is forever mendable and able to be rehydrated and continued. Sebastian works on a bamboo detail. Casey lays out the bale seats. Then the seats are cover with slip and cobbed together, making it very strong. We sculpt a sun at the center point of the top Many, many people are involved with making it happen Across town, at another project site, I lead a plaster workshop. We are applying the final coat of plaster on a cob bench built the previous year. Ellen has a great time finishing the project, she has put a lot of energy into the transformation of her backyard into a food forest sanctuary and community garden. She can't wait to enjoy using the bench! So excited for next year, please check out www.cityrepair.org for more info, and see you there!

Cob Loop-de-Loop!

2010-11-10T23:40:32-08:00

Welcome to the BRING Planet Improvement Center! I'm building a piece for their sculpture park called the Garden of Earthly Delights. It's a totally ground-breaking, never been done before that I know of, cob-adobe hybrid spiraling loop-de-loop... yes, all that and some. the 'before' shot Laying the urbanite foundation with a gravel bed below and reclaimed chimney bricks every 8 feet. Something had to break up the 50' long curved bench. The gently curving part is intended for classroom style seating when BRING wants to host groups to learn about sustainability, salvage and using reclaimed materials. A group of high school students spends their spring break getting muddy and learning about how to build with cob. We finish most of the length of the bench that week. Then, I begin the loop Building up the plynths more cob, even solo finally the bases are ready and I start the adobe arch, using a 5 foot diameter plywood form a new friend, Jessica Gray, helps out making arches is a total blast! More cob, fleshing out the structural adobe arch More builder friends join in to help with the integral roof/bench surface. We're using toilet tank covers to protect the cob. We debate it for a long while and decide to go with a salvaged steel armature to support the overhang of the toilet tank covers. It's totally great working at a salvage warehouse, all materials right on hand! Eva Miller and I trim the form of the loop Max and Fezzo work on the toilet tank extravaganza Each piece is slightly sloped to the rear to drain. We use cementitious mortar to set the porcelin The toilet tank covers follow the form of the bench and spiral upwards we have to get clever about how we will secure them up-side-down It takes all four of us to get them to behave Wired in and temporary strings help out too. Defying gravity is one of my favorite things... Super hero pvc'ers to the rescue for the rafters, another great find at the warehouse the roof for the loop gets framed with these, Max Edelson takes on that project I teach a workshop on earthen plasters and have several wonderful folks join in on the finishing touches Hooray! Ethan Rainwater, the Garden Designer is happy with what we've created. some finished shots, with two coats of linseed oil, this thing looks an awful lot like a chocolate frosted donut... complete with sprinkles! my original sketch/rendering that I presented to get the gig quite like I thought it would be!