Firespeaking

This is a fun video of Eva building an adobe oven along with friend and collaborator Demian Iusso of Manos en El Barro Natural Building in Patagonia, Argentina.  Activate and enjoy!

Other Media Links….

Latest News:

• New heaters in the world - a summer update! - August 6, 2010
• Firespeaking wins two awards at this year's Masonry Heater Association annual gathering! - May 28, 2010

Videos:

• Bioconstruyendo: Argentinian Natural Building Festival - May 29, 2010
• Adobe Oven in Golondrinas, Argentina - May 26, 2010

Articles & Essays:

• Mark Twain on European Masonry Stoves - June 4, 2010
• Our Vision: Towards a Craft School - May 29, 2010

Front Page Archive:

• Summer is a time of action! - July 1, 2010
• Spring is a time to sow intentions... - April 7, 2010
• The winter solstice marks a new birth for Firespeaking! - November 29, 2009

Five Oaks Farm is a small family farm located on the Henry Wilhelm Estate that was built in 1865 and is a historic landmark. The farm is located just off the Oregon Trail and was originally 160 acres with a house, chicken coop, sheep barn, stable, and black smith. The original outhouse is still hidden in the blackberries. The apple orchard, walnut tree and grape vines continue to fruit like gifts from the pioneers who settled here over 150 years ago.

Carol and Barry knew at first sight that the wonderful and historic Victorian house with a homestead apple orchard, original barns and five towering oak trees was where they wanted to live, grow their pesto business and raise their four boys.

They hired me to design and build this wood fired earth oven to establish and outdoor kitchen/gathering place near the vegetable garden.  The oven was created almost completely from on-site materials and by family and neighbors during a workshop I led in June 2009.   In addition to general baking and pizza parties,  they wanted this oven to bake fresh bread that they could serve along with their delicious pesto at weekly farmer’s markets: Dante’s Pesto.

Future plans for this gathering place include benches and counter tops that attach to the oven.

Thanks so much to all of the neighbors and friends that helped!  The roof structure was built by Mark Lakeman.

For more photos of this project, check out Eva’s blog post….

Using local materials and our creativity, we made an earthen oven at Riverfront Farm in Spokane, Washington. I led a 4 day workshop with community garden members about the ins and outs of earthen ovens, including how to bake in them.  The project was a part of “Green Jobs Now: National Day of Action to Build the New Economy”, in which we joined with 700 communities and 50,000 people across the North America.  The oven will be part of a bigger outdoor kitchen and band shell and is used by the neighborhood and by “Project HOPE” toward the development of youth micro enterprise projects. See more photos on my blog www.evalarevolution.blogspot.com

This earthen oven, located in Oakland, CA, was built together with collaborator’s in life: Eva Miller and Alex Edleson.  These photos were taken by Eva; the complete process and methods of construction are beautifully documented on her blog: Todo Masa.

This is the very first pizza oven we did, next to the entrance of a mountain cabin. The “Barong”, this dragon-like character, is a mythological guardian figure for the Balinese people… and so it stands guard and protects as well as entertaining…..

During a weekend workshop we built this oven and then filled in the walls and put in the window during the following days. It is part of a slow but exciting transformation of the “ranchito” into our community center.

We didn’t have any idea how much building this oven would change our life! There’s the obvious luxury of now being able to bake bread, pies, cookies, etc., – we’ve also discovered that by shortening the long fire box by placing bricks just inside, we can transform the oven into an open fire place. This oven is built around a modified metal oil drum (hinges, shelves inside) and combines both cooking from the direct heat of the flame into the barrel tempered by a layer of the sand and the slower cooking of the entire mass as the whole oven heats up (like the traditional hornos)

The process of building this oven and recently another one at our neighbors´ reminds me of what a great addition to community living an oven offers. Both the process of building and the weekly or semi-weekly firings are events that bring us together and feed us in one way or another.