Firespeaking

This adobe pump house was built to reduce the sound coming from a generator at Spirit Pine Sanctuary.  Betty Seaman made the bricks and together with her apprentice, Natalie Spears, they built this structure in December of 2009.

Max led the construction of the roof which included milled lumber and cement- “ceramic” roof tiles.

During 2006 & 2007, Max and Alex Edleson set about the building of Alex’s house in a clearing in the woods on a community-owned piece of land in the beautiful Rio Azul valley, near El Bolson, Argentina (Patagonia).  The building is a hybrid of natural building techniques including round-pole timber framing, rustic carpentry, non-load bearing strawbale, wattle and daub and living roofs.  We harvested about half the wood for the building from the woods around the house and a had a local woodsman bring in the other half by truck, some of it milled.  Our good friend Simon Van den Heede grew the oats that the straw for the straw bales came from and one fine fall day, with the first sprinklings of the season, we swept the recently harvested bales off of the field and stored them under the newly constructed roof.  We still have yet to make and place the shingles on the front roof so the corrugated asphalt roof is temporary.

Consider the whole structure an homage to the sun, completely oriented to that infinitely generous source of heat and light….

In October 2009, Eva, Max and the fantastic Betty Seaman of Spirit Pine were hired by an accomplished healer in the Santa Barbara area to construct a building to do prayer in.  Perscriptions for the building were that it be affordable and that it follow basic Huichol cultural guidelines for such a space which included being made of adobe and having few windows.  Here’s what we built….

The work of many hands and hearts created this building, the kindergarden of a parent-cooperatively run Waldorf school. It was born from a 10 day workshop that we put on with Janell Kapoor from Kleiwerks in the summer of 2005. A few of us, along with the help of many volunteers and curious passer-byers, continued working on it until one fine autumn day its doors opened and the sound of kids laughter filled it….