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In This Issue...
April 20th Member Meeting
Rainwater Harvesting Site Visits, May 7
International Straw Bale Registry
Natural Builder wanted in Oregon
SBC Calendar:
April 20th - Member Meeting at Casa de Luz
April 23rd - SBC Site Visit
April 23rd - It's Your Park Day!
May 7th - Rainwater Harvesting Site Visit
June 13-20th - Build Here Now Workshop
Ecological Visionaries,
On behalf of the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, this
is Mark Lakeman sending word of the Village Building
Convergence 2005. If you have not yet heard of the VBC, please
keep reading below.
The VBC is a 10 day hands-on event when hundreds of people will
be able to practice being Villagers while living in sustainable
urban culture. The VBC will be held from May 20 - 29, and during
that time more than 25 communities in every quadrant of the city
will be working together to transform the spaces where they live
into ecological and sacred places that express direct, creative
and democratic participation.
For more information go to www.cityrepair.org/vbc.
Please let us know if you want to come join us for the Village
Building Convergence 2005!
Mark Lakeman
Co-Director, Creative Vision
The City Repair Project
Portland, Oregon
www.cityrepair.org
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April 20th Member Meeting:
Building with Natural Local Materials and Traditional Techniques
with Dr. E. Logan Wagner, AIA
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Central Texas is blessed with an abundance
and wide variety of natural building materials. These include
stone, such as limestone and granite; soils, including caliche,
clay and decomposed granite; and trees and plants such as
cedar, mesquite and prickly pear cactus. Using traditional
methods, these stones, soils and plants can be utilized
in various forms to create building walls, floors, roofs
and more. Local soils can be used to create adobe bricks,
Pise or rammed earth to build massive walls. Clays can be
made into low-fired roof and floor tiles or bricks for building
domes and vaults. Using primitive hand tools, stones can
be formed into a variety of architectural elements such
as lintels, downspouts, columns, arches, counters and pavers.
Mortars and stuccoes can be made from lime, clay and prickly
pear cactus. Hand hewn local woods can be fashioned into
doors, lintels, beams, columns and floors.
The use of natural building materials coupled with traditional
building techniques need not be limited to traditional historic
designs. These same materials and techniques, combined with
modern building elements and appliances, can produce modern,
state of the art architecture.
With a mission of making buildings more energy efficient
and sustainable, Logan Wagner formed ALARIFE, a design-build
architectural firm specializing in architectural restoration
and the use of local materials, in 1985. His international
practice has done or is currently doing projects in Mexico,
Northern Mariana Islands, Costa Rica and Hawaii as well
as in several states in the southwestern United States.
Logan will share will us some of his extensive knowledge
and experience with local natural materials and the traditional
techniques used to fashion them into beautiful building
components.
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Please
join Logan to learn more about building with local materials.
SBC meets every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 7 pm at Casa
de Luz, 1701 Toomey Road in the Cielo Room. You are welcome
to join us before the meeting at 6 pm for a wonderful macrobiotic
meal at Casa de Luz.
Rainwater Harvesting Site
Visits , May 7th, 2005
Join SBC on
May 7th, 2005 at 2:00 pm as we tour two residences that employ
rainwater harvesting systems. We will be visiting Joe Wheeler's
residence first and then proceeding to Dick Peterson's residence.
Joe presented this line of rainwater filters at the March 16th,
2005 Member Meeting. Dick Peterson is the Environmental Program
Coordinator for the City of Austin Green Building Program.
Directions
to Joe Wheeler's Residence, 7901 Spicewood Springs Rd,
78759
2 miles from
US 183 and 3.3 miles from Loop 360 on the two lane portion of
Spicewood Springs Rd. A yellow house set back from the road next
to the Oak Grove Church (no building) and cemetery, between bridges
#6 & #7.
Directions
to Dick Peterson's Residence:
From US183
and Spicewood Springs, take the northbound access road for 183.
Just stay on the access road about one mile until you reach Anderson
Mill Road. Take a right on Anderson Mill. Go through 2 traffic
lights. After the second traffic light, you will pass two schools
on the right and a strip center full of bandit signs (ugh!). As
you approach Morris Road, you will see two baseball practice fields
on the left. Turn left on Morris just past the fields and just
before the Austin Auction Company building. Then take the first
right on Slant Oak. We are the next to last house on the right,
at the cul-de-sac. Park anywhere except on the bluebonnets. Come
in the right side gate to the first, wooden tank.
Register your straw-bale building on the International
Straw Bale Registry
There is
a growing interest and need to gather information about straw-bale
buildings around the world. We are interested in learning more
about business, commercial and industrial buildings, churches
and schools, homes and housing (such as elderly housing, ecovillages,
cohousing, multi-family housing), studios and workshops, all types of buildings
and uses of strawbale. People want to know what the growth rate
in straw-bale construction is over the past five years; where and what types
of buildings are being constructed; what methods are being used
as well as design features. They want to get in touch with people who are working
on a similar project in their area - say a commercial building
is being planned and the people putting the project together want to know if other
people have done the same type of building and what they can learn
from them.
To accomplish
this, we ask that you list your straw-bale building on the International
Straw Bale Registry. Greenbuilder.com, The Last Straw Journal, The
Straw Bale Association of Texas, and the Development Center for
Appropriate Technology along with a number of regional strawbale
organizations are working together to build a database of buildings
constructed using straw bales. The aggregate numbers will be useful
in many ways: future research and performance testing, educating insurance
companies, mortgage companies, realtors and real estate appraisers,
building officials. It will also be useful in further popularizing
SB to the general public worldwide. Reading in a magazine article
that "over $xxx million in straw-bale construction already
exists in North America" can have a strong effect on our credibility.
The registry also serves as a source of information and contacts
for The Last Straw for articles, surveys, project pages and other
journal content. It's a very valuable tool for the straw-bale community
worldwide.
There are built-in safeguards to ensure privacy about your project,
if you desire. You can share as much or as little information
as you want. You can opt to list your project as available for public viewing,
but you don't have to.
Donations to support this project are welcome. The Last Straw's
publisher, The Green Prairie Foundation for Sustainability/GPFS,
is a 501(c)(3) and can accept tax deductible contributions. Please
send donations to GPFS/TLS to:
International Straw Bale Registry Project
The Last Straw Journal
P.O. Box 22706
Lincoln, NE, 68542-2706
Intentional Community in Oregon
seeks Natural Builder
Lost Valley Educational Center seeks an experienced natural builder
to lead us in realizing our visions to create beautiful new spaces
and enhance existing structures. Experience could include cob,
straw bale, light-clay, wattle-and-daub, timber framing, rammed
earth, cordwood masonry, papercrete, stone, living roofs, natural
plasters and finishes, and alternative foundations. Ideally, this
person would be able to lead workshops in the same. Familiarity
with the Pacific Northwest bioregion a plus. General building
skills required, including electrical and plumbing. This position
involves management skills, project planning, and site design
as well as hands-on building and repair.
Lost Valley Educational Center is an intentional community of
approximately 20 members who live and work on 87 acres of rural
land outside of Eugene, Oregon. We pride ourselves in honest,
open-hearted communication, consensus decision-making, finding
balance between the needs of the person and the group and between
a fully sustainable life-style and with the larger culture. We
host many workshops as part of our Educational Center, including
a thriving permaculture program, and a thriving personal growth
program, Heart of Now, which are presented by Lost Valley staff.
We are currently looking for new members to join us in this exciting
adventure. There are several "jobs" available as well
as a number of other community spaces for people with independent
income. You must become a community member in order to apply for
a "job".
We appreciate community members who have people skills, are grounded,
generous, honest, have integrity, joy, are financial responsibility,
accepting of others' differences, group-minded, self-motivated,
dedicated to sustainability and willing to love self and others.
Folks who have slightly less experience than we desire, can not
give a time commitment, or are not interested in community membership
right away, may be eligible for our maintenance team member position
or internship.
For more information, check out our website at http://www.lostvalley.org
or reply to jobs@lostvalley.org
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