day one design

Aprovecho Sustainable Shelter Series 2011: Inside Insulation Course

2012-04-08T18:06:01-07:00

Welcome to Aprovecho! This year is the first of an annual offering called the Sustainable Shelter Series. It's an amazing overview of natural construction techniques at a very beautiful place near Cottage Grove, Oregon. I'm here teaching the week-long insulation section of the series. This first picture is of the structure as I arrive to it, a beautiful hybrid timberframe ready for strawbales on the northwall, light clay straw on the east and west and chip-slip infill on the south. Talk about a lot going on in a little playhouse! Bale infill begins the first day Bales make great scaffolding too! starting the mud mix for the light clay straw this is a great screen system for a wheelbarrow, I want one of my own! chinking the bales ramming the straw clay mixing table making slip from the nearby pond's pure clay, what a resource! more mixing! the forms leap-frog up and before you know it, we've got solid walls! reed mats for forms for the chip-slip sections uh-oh, no workshop complete with out a mud fight! one week and a dozen hard workers... and we've got some naturally insulated walls!

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

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!

'Living Walls' plaster over an 'EcoNest' -- Working with Lime

2009-12-20T22:18:50-08:00

Alright, this had been a big job, and hence, haven't written in a while. But finally finished and what a good one it has been! Especially for those of you interested in the super flat and super refined earth plaster style. Good to practice. The structure is a heavy timberframe with a mixture of traditional european and japanese joinery and infilled Light Clay-Straw. It was designed by Paula LaPorte and the construction was led by her husband, Robert Laporte, of EcoNest. My mom was at the straw-clay workshop for this structure, where I got introduced to the project from early on. Little did I know, six months later, when the walls were thoroughly dry, I would be on a team of four to plaster the whole thing. For this project, I joined the crew of Living Walls, a Portland-based earth plaster company, led by Joshua Klyber. We did a lime plaster system on the outside and earth plaster with aliz on the interior. And we had a lot of fun! This post will focus on the lime plaster portion and my next will cover the earth plaster work. Enjoy! The site and our mortar mixer set-up. The Light Straw-Clay walls to be covered. Base coat of lime goes up Greg works it! Comin' around the corner! base and finish coat shown clearly here Joshua is so silly sometimes! Pigmented lime wash the fun part! cleaning up the stonework with muriatic acid classic Econest!

This finish is at minimum a seven-pass system. First, we prime or lathe all windows edges, corners and other expanses of wood. Then we apply the rough base coat of lime plaster which has a lot of gravel. Next we press the plaster with a wood trowel to compact the lime as it dries. Then we score the surface with a small rake or scarifier. Then we come around again with a finish coat, no gravel in it this time. We follow again with a hard-packing motion with a wood trowel. Then we brush all the loose sand from the surface. Finally we apply a lime wash to give the surface color, actually two coats. So in all, we have come around to every square inch of this exterior wall surface nine times. Labor intense, no joke!