This is a really interesting approach in that they are combining affordability with ecological design and training and skills required to build. It is focused not just on providing quality eco-housing, but in doing so as part of reviving rural economies. This social enterprise approach wants to avoid affordable housing being imposed on rural villages by external developers and instead wants local residents themselves to collaborate and build the houses that they need. They define ‘local residents’ as those who meet local-needs housing criteria (agreed with the local community) basically;
- children of local, long-time residents,
- have pre-school children, or children in local schools,
- work locally, especially in core/low paid services, e.g; education, healthcare, agriculture

In terms of cost they calculate that “ The cost of land, materials, training course and legal/planning will typically be about £85k, with a deposit of £5 -10k in stages, then balance payable quarterly in stages from an arranged mortgage. In addition the self-building work is valued at between £40-50,000, which becomes part of their equity in the property (or provides funds to complete the home if required). Members will typically own 60% equity in a home valued at about £225,000, and the balance will remain in the CLT for further social investment”. Although not necessarily ‘cheap’ the securing of the properties into a CLT means that they will remain available as affordable housing in the area permanently. They are not designed to be houses through which people make a profit and move on. The investment of considerable ‘sweat equity’ (working yourself to build your house) will also hopefully reduce the numbers of people who want simply to make money rather than invest time and energy in building rural communities.

In terms of design they have come up with a simple design intended specifically for self-build, which incorporates the following features:

• Advanced passive solar design incorporating very high insulation (straw bale walls and sheep’s wool roof insulation) and thermal mass (rammed earth) for very low additional heating need
• Straw bales rendered with clay have much higher fire resistance than timber framed houses, and provide excellent sound insulation.
• Locally sourced, natural materials and simple, mainly hand tools build (including gabion rather than concrete foundations)
• Adaptable with optional extras to suit individual families and site conditions
• Flexible exterior proportions and finishes to blend with local vernacular
• Designed to lifetime standards
• Heating provided by wood burning stoves and solar hot water
• Solar PV
• Either dry compost loos or reed bed system for reduced use of water and sewerage
• Rainwater harvesting
• Simple site layout with minimal hard landscaping, keeping cars to one edge

If you live in south Devon and would like to be part of this pilot project, or if you’d like to be kept informed of progress, email them at selfbuildhomes@landsociety.com

For those of you in the UK there is a really interesting conference in a few weeks time in York. The organisation Earth Build UK  is having a conference on ‘The use of earth and clay plasters’. The organisation aims to promote and support building with earth in the UK by:

• promote earth building in contemporary construction
• assist the recognition, understanding and significance of earth buildings
• foster traditional skills and promote new technologies
• network our membership to promote earth building locally, nationally and internationally
• research and develop technical understanding
• share experience and knowledge through a program of seminars and annual conferences.

The conference is on 13th January and includes talks by Tom Morton (Arc Architects http://www.arc-architects.com/), Annabel Fawcus (EarthedWorld http://earthedworld.co.uk/), Ben Gourley (University of York), Nigel Copsey (Earth, Stone and Lime company http://www.nigelcopsey.com/), Andrew Heath (BRE Centre for Innovative Construction Materials, University of Bath http://www.bath.ac.uk/bre/), Adam Weismann and Katy Bryce (Clayworks http://www.clay-works.com/), Barbara Jones (Straw Works http://strawworks.co.uk/) and Neil May (Natural Building Technologies www.natural-building.co.uk).

The conference fee for EBUK members is £42.00. This includes refreshments and lunch. If you are not already an EBUK member the conference fee is £63.00 (this includes a full year’s membership of EBUK).

It seems like a really simple thing to do and there are numerous standards by which eco-houses are measured (such as Code for Sustainable Homes, AECB and BREAM Eco Homes). However, my concern is that as soon as a checklist is created some really innovative buildings are excluded and others do just enough to reach the standard but miss the bigger picture of what an eco-house is. So I want to find a way of defining an eco-house that includes the sheer diversity of eco-buildings we have in Britain (the database is starting with a focus on Britain and will hopefully expand later).

It needs to include a self-built low impact development using straw bale, just as much as a high-tech developer-built home. I need to find a simple set of criteria which I can use to determine what homes should be included in the database. It needs to be simple in order to be open and accountable to users, and to be as inclusive as possible while also setting a high bar as to what an eco-house should really represent. I have devised a list whereby if a house has any one of the criteria below then I consider it to be an eco-house:

• Reduce energy use in some form (i.e. ground source heat pump)
• High level of insulation
• Use of renewable technology (photovoltaic’s, solar water heating, wind turbine)
• Solar passive design (or shading)
• Extensively used reclaimed or recycled materials
• Reduces waste produced (for example eco-sewage systems or recycling of brown water)
• Double or tripled gazed windows with a U value of 1.5 Wm²k or lower
• Low carbon or zero carbon house
• Rainwater harvesting or water collection systems, low water-use appliances, reductions in run-off
• Deliberately small or compact design to reduce resource use
• Green or grass roof for increased insulation
• Grass roof for wildlife
• Use of ecological materials like adobe, straw, sheeps wool, hemp, sand bag, reclaimed bricks, or wood (if FSC or reclaimed)
• Passivhus standard
• Deliberate avoidance of using environmentally damaging materials (such as concrete, lead, bricks etc)
• Built using locally available materials
• Heat recovery systems
• Level 5 or 6 Code for Sustainable Homes
• AECB Silver or Gold Standard
• BREAM Eco Homes Standard level ‘Excellent’
• Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) Rating A
• Air tightness of less than 5 m³/m²hr (air movement) at 50 Pa

I would be interested to hear people’s opinions on this list and whether it is acceptable to enable buildings to be considered ecological by doing just one of the above. There are obviously important relationships between these criteria. For example, installing photovoltaic’s on a poorly insulated house is not very efficient, just has having highly insulated walls but low quality windows reduces the effectiveness of the insulation. However, to account for the relationships between these criteria significantly complicates defining an eco-house. There are an infinite set of possibilities available as we redesign our homes, but how do we define in an age of such building diversity when a house is an eco-house?

[7^th November, Leicestershire]

Each talk incorporated a different approach to understanding eco-housing – cultural understandings of what houses and homes mean, children’s geographies, architectural perspectives and scientific understandings.

The speakers

It was a truly interdisciplinary event with participants from the disciplines of civil engineering, anthropology, architecture, environmental science, geography, urban affairs and planning, and practitioners from social housing groups and climate change action groups. Productive and fruitful discussion was had as ideas and different experiences and perspectives were shared in the final panel and roundtable session.

Roundtable discussion about the future of eco-housing

Thanks to everyone who attended and I hope that these conversations will be continued and new research collaborations will emerge. I hope to post up links to the talks (which were recorded) soon.

[Leicester, 3rd October 2011]

Entrance sign and old farmhouse

This renovation was finished in March 2009 and the village is now homes to 50 adults and 13 children aged 7 and under. Organisationally everything is run by consensus through a Home Owners Association and there are membership conditions through a number of bylaws which determine certain responsibilities such as attending communal meals and meetings, and contributing eight hours each month to communal maintenance, working the gardens, harvesting and storing food. They also have different ‘teams’ which take responsibility for certain areas like food, facilitation, events, compost, maintenance etc.

The main housing units and the communal space in front of them

At first glance from the road Columbia looks like a pretty standard (albeit colourful) retrofit of existing apartment blocks with the unfortunate central focus on a car park, but much of its wonder lies in the back half of the plot – where the gardens are – and in the way the different spaces inside the buildings are used.

The six bee hives

The gardens are large and include individual growing plots, chickens, bees, a permaculture food forest, fruit and nut trees (walnut and hazelnut) and also space for more formal gardens. Once in the wooded area at the back it is easy to forget that you are in a city at all. Even the gardens near the original housing units are lush and varied and provide both food and shade for residents. There is also a ‘grazing zone’ which is where residents are encouraged to pick and eat the produce as they walk through the gardens. As such there is a great variety in the way the green spaces are used – as individual, communal, grazing annuals and permanent spaces make it feel bigger than it actually is. There is hope that they might be able to reduce the size of the asphalt car park in due course and reclaim it for a greener use.

Trees at the back of the project and eggs from the chickens in the bulk food room

There are also a large number of communal spaces such as a laundry room, meeting and craft room, outdoor drying space, covered (new) bike shed, compost bins areas, and the old farmhouse is used as communal space with a kitchen, dining and sitting room, quiet room, bulk food storage area, gathering room and several guest rooms. Each resident is allowed to use the guest rooms 28 days a year for $5 a night – an excellent way to reduce the need for people to have their own spare guest space which would likely remain unused much of the year. In the same way new external individual storage units have been built for people to store extra belongings, reducing the size of home unit required. All these extra spaces available reduce any replication of individual use and make obvious ecological savings.

Extra individual storage units and communal garden space

The huge variety and physical size of communal space and the carefully constructed organisational structure certainly emphasises the collective nature of Columbia – it is more of a collective enterprise than many of the other eco-build communities I visited and this is certainly one of its great strengths.

In terms of cost the units here are not really low cost. When sold in 2009 a studio unit cost US$150,000 (£100,000) and a the largest three bedroom, two bathroom units were $330,000 (£220,000). They were a reasonable price for the area but cannot really be considered ‘affordable’. Although the actual costs of creating Columbia were dramatically reduced by retrofitting and creating small units, the initial buy-in costs are quite high. This is likely to have had an effect on the demographic at Columbia which is older than somewhere like Kailash eco-village. However, there was clearly demand for the type of co-housing that Columbia offers – with a quick uptake of units and the few that have resold have done so easily. Those that I spoke to also enjoyed the lack of immediate responsibility for a large dwelling and garden all to themselves. In other words, although they had obligations to community work this was a shared responsibility they enjoyed rather than the worry of owning and dealing with a place all to oneself.

My visit to Columbia was brief but inspiring. Very different to many other places it mixes an emphasis on permaculture and collectivity with a design and feel which is more likely to have a broader appeal. As such it is a useful model which could be replicated elsewhere and adapted as required to potentially become more affordable.

For further information about Columbia see their website: http://columbiaecovillage.org

I had the great opportunity to stay at Kailash Eco-village for ten days in August last year. It was the last stop on my trip around eco-buildings in the USA and it did not disappoint. Kailash shares some similarities with Los Angeles Eco-Village – in that it is a deliberately urban project which enables people to rent eco-units and participate in some collective activities. What was most appealing was the explicit focus on affordability – using a rental rather than owner model.

Situated in south east Portland in what a realtor might call an ‘up and coming’ neighbourhood (Creston-Kenilworth), Kailash took over an old 32-unit apartment building built in 1959 on a one acre site. Bought by Ole and Maitri Ersson in 2007 they explicitly wanted to create an affordable and accessible way for those on low incomes to participate in a sustainable community. In effect it allows people to try out community living without the risks (or barrier) of capital investment.

All the units are one-bedroom apartments with a typical living area of 565 square foot. Units can be rented at approximately $650 a month in 2010, low for the area. They have also added a dorm room “as not all residents are able to afford their own private unit” (www.kailashecovillage.com). There are currently 48 residents, ten of whom were resident when the block was bought. Those who have joined since the Ersson’s took over have had to pass a selection procedure and agree to certain stipulations.

Inside a refurbished unit and a typical floor plan

Each apartment is gradually being remodelled using ecological principles in order to increase energy efficiency – using eco-materials, fitting low-flow shower heads, installing water metres in each unit, adding extra insulation and double-pained windows. They are experimenting with materials, trying to balance low cost with ecological properties. For example, they trialled using carpets but the wear has been too high and so have moved to using laminate flooring (which uses more glue but is likely to last longer). Fundamentally however the very act of retrofitting rather than demolishing has proved both ecological and cost-effective.

There are a great many other future projects which Ole and Maitri would like to do as Kailash is only three years old; including rainwater harvesting and an exterior make-over. The whole block faces south and so benefits from passive solar but they are hoping to install external blinds to prevent overheating in summer.

Bike racks and communal compost

Kailash have deliberately tried to create lots of different types of communal space. There is a community meeting room with a large kitchen and another next to it. There is a laundry room which has storage spaces, post boxes, recycling bins (including items not normally recycled like plastics, styrofoam and shredded paper), and communal equipment like a vacuum cleaner. There is also a separate garden and tool room. There is collective bike storage and composting. Other areas like the balconies and walkways are also explicitly considered communal and this is used for things like a ‘freebie’ shelf where people put things they no longer want for others to use. Community is encouraged through people encountering each other in these spaces, getting to know their neighbours, a weekly community night and work parties. Perhaps most interestingly, however, was the decision by Ole and Maitri to not have collective decision making. Instead Maitri is the Community Manager and they make all decisions. This has simplified and speeded-up their ability to get Kaliash off the ground and to make renovations.

A variety of communal spaces: balcony and walkways, garden seats, community meeting room

Gardens space is segmented into individual plots (ten are available in total), with communal tables and chairs. Gardens are important here to the extent that one of the first changes was to turn an old swimming pool into a new terraced garden area. Encouraging gardening is core to the eco-village and with this is mind they made the choice to limit the amount of communal garden – instead hoping that individual plots would encourage people to be creative and invest time in their own space. It seems to have worked. All lawn (bar one tenants) has been turned into active garden and despite being small the gardens are a wonder of colour, production (strawberries, tomatoes, bees) and calm retreat from the city. This emphasis on creating a beautiful place is evident throughout the site and is an important part of Kailash – making eco-living seem attractive and appealing, a ‘shining example’ for others to follow.

The whole site is arranged to encourage tenants to participate, to encourage people to get involved, but not to penalise if they do not. There is an interesting balance here between rules which might enforce ‘green behaviour’ and the benefits of people deciding to take green actions themselves. The eco-village has mission and values statements which encourage residents to value ‘the diversity of our community’, ‘regular community gatherings’, ‘common facilities’, ‘frugal use of energy and resources’ and ‘human powered transport and its infrastructure’ among many other things. There is a monthly pot-luck vegan meal and veganism is encouraged but not enforced. Likewise ample bike storage is offered, external clothes lines and wooden clothes dryers are communal, and car parking spaces limited. It is a subtle process of leading by example.

On the other hand individual unit water metres are gradually being installed to encourage reductions in water use, and tenants have to commit to recycling as part of their rental agreement and agree that all communal spaces are vegan (including the garden which excludes the keeping of chickens). Overall, the emphasis is on behaviour change rather than relying upon the ecological features of the building to reduce energy use. Many of these changes are also low-cost, so cycling rather than driving, not using a tumble dryer and reducing water use all save money.

When I first arrived at Kailash I had struggled to understand how it was a ‘village’ or a ‘community’ in the sense that I had understood other eco-projects I had visited. But after ten days I really began to value the different approach taken here. Everyone I had met had been immediately welcoming but there was also a beautiful slowness in getting to know Kailash and understand it’s perhaps more subtle sense of community. Its emphasis on affordability has also opened it up to a more diverse range of people than other projects, and although the small size of the units might ultimately limit who can stay (as in there are limited possibilities for large families) this also creates a much needed space for singles, couples and the younger and older generations.

There is also merit in not using all the collective energy of a place to make each decision and allowing others to take the lead. It opens community to those who are busy and committed to work or projects elsewhere. Perhaps this does lead to a slight sense of disengagement for some residents, but it is unclear to me whether the lack of engagement in work parties (for example) is an effect of the lack of individual ownership, or participation in decision making, or simple reflects the slow process of growing a community. My experience of Kaliash suggests that this divergent form of being an eco-village opens up sustainable living to more possibilities and far more people.

For further information about Kailash eco-village see their website: www.kailashecovillage.com

[23rd April 2011]

I have written an initial report from the research project looking at ways we can make eco-housing more affordable. Please download a copy from here: Eco-homes Report 2011 (1 MB). Please also feel free to redistribute it.

You can also download higher resolution versions: Eco-homes Report 2011 (3 MB), Eco-homes Report 2011 (12 MB)

The key findings about low cost eco-homes are that:

~ We need both a technical assessment of materials and methods used, and a social assessment of people’s choices and decisions in order to understand eco-housing.

~ There is a diverse variety of eco-housing worldwide. The definition used in this report is that an eco-building minimises resource use (in construction and life-cycle) while also providing a comfortable environment in which to live. The USA has a long-standing and established eco-building culture, whereas eco-building has only existed in Thailand in the last decade.

~ We already have the technical knowhow, and many working examples, to build resilient eco-houses in Britain. However, ecological building methods remain marginalised and often misunderstood.

~ Eco-building will only be adopted if it offers what people demand from a house and that they can live how they want to within it.

~ The success of eco-housing is only as great as the behaviour of the people who live in it. Construction and technology cannot compensate for excessive energy use.

~ There remains a perception that building an eco-house is more costly, whereas figures for the lifecycle costs of buildings have proved that in the long term they are actually cheaper. More investment may be required upfront but it pays off in costing less to run throughout its lifetime.

~ Living sustainably has been associated with forgoing (doing without) many elements of contemporary life. However, a good eco-house is actually more comfortable.

~ It is not technology, or even politics, which is holding us back in building more eco-houses, it is deep rooted cultural and social conventions in how we live and what we expect houses to do for us.

~ Choices of building materials are made according to complex compromises between cost, local availability, skills and expertise required, suitability for climate, ecological properties, maintenance requirements and cultural attachments to certain forms. Thus eco-materials need to satisfy many criteria before they are adopted.

~ Eco-building involves more than technical changes to construction; it involves cultural shifts in how we consider our houses and homes.  There are dynamic relationships between physical structures and individual behavioural practices, culture, history and place.

~ There are many simple ways to make eco-housing more affordable, including:

• Reducing the size
• Simple design and avoiding the use of unnecessary technology
• Designing affordability in at the start
• Designing in modular units so that a building can be extended at a later stage
• Internal open plan design to enable maximum flexibility
• Using the space between buildings
• Building collectively
• Sharing common facilities and infrastructure
• Sharing the cost of the land
• Avoiding the use of experts
• Participating in the debate about new planning regulations to ensure that eco-building is permissible
• Careful choice of materials
• Less durable houses
• Using pre-fabricated elements or existing structures
• Avoiding a purist approach
• Ensuring design is aesthetically pleasing
• Using hybrid combinations of materials

~ Planning favours buildings which conform to existing styles and norms and building regulations need to be negotiated.

~ Eco-building is gendered in that is it perceived to be a male domain where men are presumed to be better builders, more men than women actually build and women find their ideas and contributions to eco-building are often belittled. Socially constructed notions of gender have determined that strength is the most important attribute required for building, which is not true.

~ The replication of eco-build techniques worldwide has less to do with whether the build actually worked or its cost, but is influenced by the less quantifiable factors of foreign importation of ideas, the appeal of the aesthetics, open discussion of failure, a critical mass of support, assertive pioneers, and people understanding how their existing houses work.

~ Further research work is needed on how people understand their houses, how eco-build approaches are replicated, post-occupancy evaluations and the cultural dimensions of eco-building.

[25th March 2011]

Permaculture has had a big influence upon green ideas in Britain in recent years, but in the main this has been expressed through changing practices of gardening and food production, eschewing many of its wider implications for the built environment, land tenure, planning and economics. However green buildings, appropriate land tensure and community governance are vitally important in supporting the more visible aspects of permaculture practice. The Permaculture Association refers to these elements as part of the ‘invisible structures’ of permaculture and argue that “we need to ensure that the physical systems we create are able to be maintained and developed long into the future”.

Tony’s roundhouse at Brithdr Mawr, Wales

In Britain there is a particular deep green version of eco-buildings called Low Impact Development (LID). LID is a radical approach to housing, livelihoods and everyday living that began in Britain in the 1990s as a grassroots response to the overlapping crises of sustainability. LID employs approaches that dramatically reduce humans’ impact upon the environment, demonstrating that human settlements and livelihoods, when done appropriately, can enhance, rather than diminish ecological diversity. However, LID is not solely concerned with the environment. It is also a direct response to social needs for housing, an anti-capitalist strategy forging alternative economic possibilities, and a holistic approach to living that pays attention to the personal as well as the political. Many of its key advocates and designers are trained in permaculture design (for example, Ben Law, who built an eco-house in Prickly Nut Wood, East Sussex, has a Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design) though others describe themselves as ‘accidental’ permaculturists. As such Low Impact Development, has been described by Tony Wrench, of Brithdr Mawr, “as being a catalyst for letting permaculture happen in the countryside and letting people with no money or very little money, live a balanced lifestyle that will survive economic crises, and will survive peak oil”.

LID reflects the ethics of permaculture in two keys ways: in its holistic approach and in its emphasis upon the importance of people and the personal. LID takes holism – the idea that we need to understand the whole of a system (physical, social, economic, and psychological) and that the properties of a system cannot be understood by its component parts alone – as its approach to understanding how humans should interact with the environment. For Will (Green Hill) this holism is central to permaculture; “one of the things that defines permaculture is to try and – for an individual or a group – do the whole process, be both implementer and designer and observer, and evaluator as well, to learn lessons … because it’s incorporating people and the earth and trying to get that fair share … that defines it as being holistic”. Thus LID and permaculture advocates that in addition to physical changes we must attend to the personal and emotional too. This very much reflects a permaculture ethic of seeking to work in harmony with nature’s systems and of people care, and an acknowledgement that the personal politics of change are as important as protecting the natural environment.

Green Hill, Scotland 

Many LIDs in Britain have used permaculture as a way to structure their communities, food production, house building and livelihoods. Increasingly they have been able to shift beyond food production to a more holistic implementation of permaculture principles, just as it was originally intended, and as a result be part of “the permaculture movement [which] acts as a sort of a natural laboratory wherein potentially sustainable solutions are experimented with” (Veteto and Lockyer, 2008, 53). Permaculture has been used to shape site plan decisions, to make best use of resources and energy, to support the processes of integration rather than segregation and to assert the importance of being flexible in the face of change. However, few LIDs have been able to put permaculture fully into practice because of a difficulty of collectively agreeing the finer details of what permaculture is, and for the lack of large-scale collective working examples of permaculture in Britain.

Permaculture has openly and deliberately built upon a myriad of understandings of natures’ systems, both indigenous and western scientific, and as a result is conceived by many as being about “looking at some of those traditional ways of farming and working the land and traditional communities and saying what works and what doesn’t work?” (Will, Green Hill). Others have argued that in practice it is “only by reconnecting ourselves with our local resources can we move towards a sustainable society” (Whitefield, 1997, 8). This, however, confuses the wider lessons of permaculture in that it is a hybrid of principles, some about localism, but others about connection, integration and the balancing of needs of the earth and people. There are also tensions about the time needed to closely observe a site before any plans are made amid the acknowledgement of the need to evolve systems quickly to cope with climate change. Britain is in a transitional period of making permaculture work at a large scale in collective spaces. However, it is the broader lessons that permaculture teaches which have been embraced by eco-builds where hope really lies. In balancing the needs of the earth with those of people, of asserting the importance of equality, and crucially in tying these together with a focus on holism sustainable ecological living has begun to become a reality. As such permaculture is a useful way to understand eco-building and Low Impact development in Britain.

Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center is an intriguing mixture of teaching space, collective building, embryonic community, and a remote eco-home. Situated south of the small town of Cerrillos in New Mexico, Ampersand is at the end of several tracks snaking into the hills. In construction since 2003, the buildings here are mostly hybrid, a mixture of straw-bale walls, adobe and earth bags. Many things have been fashioned from reclaimed items such as salvaged windows, reusing wood, or using an old swivel office chair as a base for a solar oven (thus being able to move it to best catch the sun).

The main house

There is a main house – the home of Andy and Amanda Bramble – and then other more collective spaces such as a straw bale guest house, an outdoor kitchen for guests and another guest building to which a new bathroom was being added. There is also an outdoor solar shower. All the spaces are compact – making use of sleeping platforms, open plan design, and careful placement of furniture – and there is a beautiful simplicity to many of the rooms. There is enough for comfort but not clutter and certainly not an excess of things.

The straw bale and a plaster wall design

This simplicity is also evident in the way everything is designed to be efficient and minimise waste. For example, the solar thermal hot water panel is just outside the bathroom meaning it does not have to travel far to the point of use, and they feed used water into the indoor planter to water the growing vegetables – making multiple uses of what they have.

The outdoor shower

Ampersand is completely off-grid – generating all their electricity from photovoltaic panels, using solar thermal to heat water, collecting all their water via rainwater (into a 2,500 gallon tank) and using a solar oven for cooking. They also warm and cool their house passively. The back of the main house is built into the ground with only a couple of very small windows looking north from the pantry. To the front they have a greenhouse, as this heats up they let heat in through internal windows and when it is cold outside the greenhouse acts as a barrier while still letting the sun in. Their water use also is extremely low, about six gallons each per day. Water is then filtered through a Big Berkley system ready for drinking.

Growing food out here is difficult so they have built a large greenhouse to the front of their house with an indoor planter and created a large storage space – a pantry built into the ground at the back of the house. Refrigeration is limited, they “we harvest ice from an open-topped cistern in the winter to keep our food cold” (p.154) but have to use a propane powered fridge at times in the summer.

Ampersand aims to demonstrate “low-tech sustainable systems which people can do themselves, so that they are not reliant on experts” (Amanda Bramble). There is an emphasis here on having the skills and courage to do it yourself and key to this is starting small and simply learning through the experience of building small structures. It is also about building as a collective endeavour.

Inside and outside a straw bale house at Ampersand Learning Center

I can’t help but fall in love with the simplicity of some of the design and materials used here. In the straw bale guest house there is everything you need and no more or less. Everything is low cost, reclaimed, salvaged, adapted and yet it all has a beauty too. When I asked Amanda what barriers might exist in getting mainstream society to understand and value a place as eclectic as Ampersand she argued that the main obstacles are the “mental constructs of what is acceptable beauty and lifestyle”. Of course it can so easily come down to one’s own choice of aesthetics, but to me this is a place made for the future.

Off-road track to Ampersand Learning Center  and the straw bale house

If you are interested in visiting Ampersand they run classes in the spring and summer, volunteer days, have open house visit days, and occasional internships. Details are on their website: http://www.ampersandproject.org/

There is also an article written by Amanda and Andy in Sustainable Sante Fe (2010) ‘On being a beneficial influence: Off grid at Ampersand’