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 …
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This little structure was a great synthesis of bamboo and mud
I create a canya wattle with bamboo splits for bracing
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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.
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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…
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A passive solar greenhouse built from cob, light clay-straw and salvage materials. The existing backyard had several concrete pads for old sheds, so we cut them into squares and stacked them up for some thermal mass on the inside of the greenhouse, which are located to get direct sunlight only during the winter months. It also freed up the yard for garden space. The wood framing came from deconstructed sheds and decks on the property and we only needed to purchase a single piece of lumber! We infilled the wood frame with sculptural cob on the east and west walls, insulative clay-straw on the north wall, and reclaimed sliding glass doors as windows on the south. There are also operable …
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