I'm refining my thoughts on what constitutes a home.

Hello all,

Much of the time in the weeks leading up to the move to Ohio I was living at Innovative Martial Arts with Chuck, Jeanne, and Mushtaq (and various folks passing through). After both Jamilah and then Adam & Cassie moved out in the last year or so the house started feeling more like a storage facility than a home. While the house had been crowded it was always dynamic and usually fun to hang out in. I found out that living alone is rather quiet and not nearly as interesting (I did get a lot more reading done though). So I very stealthily moved back into the dojo household (ninja). With that I've realized that for me home is at least as much about the people as it is about the built environment. With this in mind I am beginning to seriously look at various housing solutions that will be very multi-purpose in nature.

Some of the criteria I will be using are as follows: The home must be sustainable, affordable (or owner built), healthy, beautiful, elegantly simple to build and operate, site appropriate, adaptable, and fun.

An additional consideration is local land use/zoning ordinances. Many places have totally counter-intuitive laws based either on ignorance (easily remedied) or corruption. It should be mandatory that new housing use rainwater catchments, composting toilets, passive solar design, etc. as a primary option and the "conventional" means as a last resort. If tax subsidies were changed to reflect the true environmental and societal costs, this would be an absolute no-brainer.

I am exploring flexible/convertible options that will evolve with the changing needs of a "family" as well as looking into ways to integrate several households into a community with many shared resources, including food producing land and a common building (or several). Eco-village at Ithaca has two neighborhoods which share a pond and a farm. Each neighborhood has a common building including guest housing, commercial grade kitchen, large dining area, library, daycare facility, and laundry as well as rentable office spaces. This idea could be morphed a number of ways into various workshops and studios. The community could create a thriving cottage industry and market. The limiting factors would be the imaginations and financial resources of the community members.

Many styles of housing fit this profile and I will be putting examples up on this blog and I recommend checking out some books on the topic. Some keywords: straw-bale, earthship, cob house, cordwood housing, log homes, green housing, solar house, rammed earth, rastra block, off-grid, permaculture , and sustainable housing. I also recommend looking into intentional communities and eco-villages. I have become very interested in what the Japanese architects and also shipbuilders have been doing with efficient and comfortable use of space.

Buddha