Tiny House Design

One of my regular readers, Malcolm, reminded me tonight about a tiny house village in Oregon that was established by a group of homeless folks through successful acts of civil disobedience. The city of Portland now accepts the existence of Dignity Village as a self-regulating, city-recognized “campground”. The Portland City Council has guaranteed the community’s existence through at least 2010 (source). The tiny homes are often built from salvaged building materials by the occupants themselves.

There is much written about the origins and governance of this community on wikipedia and the Dignity Village website but I wanted to point out two very important aspects of communities like this that may go unnoticed. Continue Reading »

While I make my living as a web designer my education and training is as a potter… which has given me a particularly close bond to… well… dirt. Construction techniques like adobe, rammed earth, cob, and earthbag are really beginning to appeal to me more and more. There’s something about building a home from the earth on the building site that just seems smart, cheap too!

I stumbled on this humanitarian earthbag eco-village project in Uganda on the Earthbag Building Blog the other day and wanted to share it with you. You can also read about the project in much more detail at EarthbagBuilding.com. The design came out of a collaboration between the local people and a team made up of people from Japanese universities.

Continue Reading »

A reader, Rebecca, suggested this book after reading my second post on Arial Homes. Gaviotas is an eco-village that has been thriving in the most extreme conditions since 1971 in the midst of some of the most intense  hostililty in Latin America. 200 people live there and have no weapons, no police, no jail, and no mayor. They farm organically, have planted millions of trees, and have found many clever ways to tapping the sun and wind for energy.

I was going to wait to write a post on Gaviotas until after I read the book but this was just too good to keep under my hat. Once I finish the book I’ll write again and report on what I find. I suspect there will be a bunch of good ideasfor those looking to build tiny house communities and eco-villages. The latest edition has a lot of good reviews on Amazon and it was just updated this year with a section on the progress they’ve made over the last ten years.

On Amazon: Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World–10th Anniversary Edition

Also see Friends of Gaviotas