The Dance with Bees Continues
Building, Insects, Working Animals — by Anthony Andrist February 6, 2012
Editor’s Note: Those keen to gain more expert insights into beekeeping would do well to take Anthony’s upcoming 1-day Introduction to Beekeeping using Permaculture Principles course, to be held March 25, 2012 at Lansdowne in the scenic Manning Valley on the Mid North Coast of NSW, Australia.
Go to the bee, thou poet: consider her ways and be wise.
– George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Looking for simplicity and compatibility between styles, we moved next towards a top-bar design. Essentially, it is a wooden bar placed horizontally across the width of the hive and has a starter strip of foundation comb or a wax bead along the centre to encourage the bees to build comb. The bar can be flat on the bottom, have a notch along the centre to place a wax strip, a semi-circle, a triangle or even a comb footprint, to give the bees a starting point. The bars are set side by side across the top of the hive and can be any length. Most bars are between 3.175 to 3.5cm wide and from 40 to 50cm long.
Comments (0)Michael Reynolds, Earthship Originator, Speaking in Sydney
Building, Courses/Workshops — by Milkwood Permaculture January 24, 2012
Guess what? Milkwood are hosting a great evening talk with Michael Reynolds, that world-leading sustainability pioneer of Earthship Biotecture, in Sydney on the 26th Feb. Do you want to come?
Comments (1)John Hardy: My Green School Dream
Aid Projects, Building, Community Projects, Eco-Villages, Education, Education Centres, Energy Systems, Village Development, Waste Systems & Recycling — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor January 16, 2012
Comments (0)Join John Hardy on a tour of the Green School, his off-the-grid school in Bali that teaches kids how to build, garden, create (and get into college). The centerpiece of campus is the spiraling Heart of School, perhaps the world’s largest freestanding bamboo building. — Ted.com
Yemen: On the Permaculture Map
Aid Projects, Building, Courses/Workshops, Village Development — by Samuel Bonello January 4, 2012
The view flying into Tarim
The country of Yemen has not been featured much on the PRI blog page. It has only been mentioned briefly in some articles discussing water shortages in the region and it has made the list of exotic destinations to apply knowledge gained in a PRI Aid Workers course. I think this is about to change.
The last days in Tarim, Yemen have uncovered a real treasure of permaculture potential. I anticipate that natural building techniques, still widely used in Yemen, will no longer be the only reason for Yemen to be on the permaculture map.
Comments (12)Why Monotonous Repetition is Unsatisfying
Building — by Nikos A. Salingaros
by Nikos A. Salingaros, The University of Texas at San Antonio (This article first appeared in Meandering Through Mathematics, 2 September 2011.)
Conjectures on combinatorial complexity
When applying mathematics to interpret our world we invariably run into formidable difficulties. Explaining human perception of our surroundings and our reactions to the environment requires that we know the mechanisms of our interaction with the world. Unfortunately, we don’t — not yet. Thus, explanations of why we react to different forms in our environment tend to be conjectural.
We know from observation that human beings crave structured variation and complex spatial rhythms around them, but not randomness. Monotonous regularity is perceived as alien, with reactions ranging from boredom to alarm. Traditional architecture focuses on producing structured variation within a multiplicity of symmetries. Contemporary architecture, on the other hand, advocates and builds structures at those two extremes: either random forms, or monotonously repetitive ones. Let us explore why human beings find the latter unappealing, and propose what they do like instead, with the ultimate aim of characterizing that mathematically.
Comments (1)A Zen View Upon the World (Less is More)
Building, Consumerism, Society — by Oyvind Holmstad December 15, 2011
This article is inspired by the Alexandrine pattern 134, Zen View. The pattern states: “The archetypal zen view occurs in a famous Japanese house, which gives this pattern its name.”
Let’s start with listening to the wisdom of A Pattern Language (Please note that the illustrations of the original text are missing):
Comments (7)The Little Pig That Built With Straw
Building — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor December 7, 2011
The University of Nottingham, UK, has created this video to showcase one of their new buildings, completed this year. It’s one of the largest strawbale buildings in Europe.
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A Multilayered Anti-Pattern
Building, Land, Society, Village Development — by Oyvind Holmstad December 6, 2011
The problem is that we are adapting to the wrong things — to images, or to short-term greed, or to the clutter of mechanics. These maladaptations are known as “antipatterns” — a term coined not by Alexander, but by software engineers. An antipattern is something that does things wrong, yet is attractive for some reason (profitable or easy in the short term, but dysfunctional, wasteful of resources, unsustainable, unhealthy in the long term). It also keeps re-appearing. Sounds like our economy and wasteful lifestyle? — Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros
CC Gjøvik, an example of a multilayered antipattern
The permaculture focus is on tracking patterns in nature and design, to create pleasure for ourselves and to find good examples for the world. Patterns work in a multitude of connections with their surroundings, and the more connections there are, the richer are the pattern languages the patterns are part of.
Unfortunately, although our pattern languages might have a deep poetry, not all people feel attracted to their harmony (meaning "the quality without a name"). Today’s disconnected people are attracted by antipatterns, this is because they are profitable or easy in the short term, and human nature is greedy and lazy. We are short term thinkers — in a world of competition the winner takes it all, and today’s capitalism is all about materialism.
Comments (3)Letters from Slovakia – a Photo Update on the Homeless Camp
Aid Projects, Building, Community Projects, Land, Urban Projects — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor November 17, 2011
Daniel Diškanec checks out his new edible friends
Photos © Craig Mackintosh
I should have shared these pictures back in August, when the pictures were taken, but was too tied up with preparations for the Tenth International Permaculture Conference (IPC10) in Jordan. Though late, I trust you’ll appreciate them anyway.
If you didn’t catch them already, be sure to read the previous two posts on this homeless camp in the mountainous north-central part of Slovakia (here and here). It’ll help you appreciate my personal satisfaction from seeing the magic of developing abundance with this project — one that can truly use the additional health-giving produce pictured and the increased economic resiliency it brings.
Comments (1)The Hunt for Low Energy Houses
Building, Energy Systems, Urban Projects — by Jessica Ryall November 15, 2011
You don’t need a super-fantastic-amazing funny-looking low energy house to cut down your home energy use if you know what you’re looking for. Not every house in suburbia is a low energy house. You have probably noticed it yourself. Some homes are just naturally bright and sunny. They’re always nice to be in and mysteriously toasty warm in winter. During the summer, all the owner has to do is open the back door and a cool breeze magically flows through the house. Other homes are the exact opposite. In winter, the sun never seems to come into the windows. The cold breeze rattles the floorboards underfoot. And that state-of-the-art gas heater only seems to warm the few inches of air around it. In summer the heat is oppressive and no matter what you try, even with the air conditioning turned up all the way, it is always more comfortable under the tree outside.
James Kalb Interviews Nikos Salingaros on Architecture’s Influence on Society and Consumerism
Building, Consumerism, Economics, Society, Village Development — by Nikos A. Salingaros November 14, 2011
Interview by James Kalb of The Philidelphia Society, August 2011
Home sweet home?
Nikos Salingaros, the mathematician and architectural theorist, recently published a new book, Twelve Lectures on Architecture: Algorithmic Sustainable Design (ISI Distributed Titles, 2010). It’s a somewhat expanded set of notes for a series of lectures he gave a couple of years ago on architecture and urbanism. As such, it gives a clear if rather spare presentation of ideas he’s presented before.
Comments (0)Jordan Valley Permaculture Project Update: Post IPC Happenings
Aid Projects, Building, Community Projects, Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Irrigation, Land, Plant Systems, Regional Water Cycle, Rehabilitation, Salination, Storm Water, Swales, Terraces, Waste Systems & Recycling, Waste Water, Water Harvesting — by Dan Lewin November 11, 2011
An aerial view of the site
Although the landscape here could be seen as a model for scarcity, what there is an abundance of is rocks. The baked dusty earth barely passes for soil and during the summer there isn’t rain here for over six months. With valuable agricultural resources seemingly at a minimum, rocks can be incredibly valuable in the design of a sustainable human settlement. In the case of the Permaculture Research Institute of Jordan’s site (PRIJ), rocks have formed the main building blocks of the swales that form the back bones of this small farm. They surround the heavily mulched planting pits for the many varieties of trees here and they also can be used for another useful function which litres of my sweat has been testament to! They make up the substrate of the grey water system into which reeds are planted that feed on the water flowing through from the sinks and showers in the washing block.
Comments (3)From Ideology to Technology
Building, Society, Urban Projects, Village Development — by Oyvind Holmstad November 9, 2011
Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros are running a series of essays in Metropolis Magazine at the moment, they are all published here. I’ve no idea how long the series will run — hopefully forever. Anyway, it’s time to introduce this series to permaculture people, and I’ll be concentrating on the first five essays about the technologies of Christopher Alexander.
The essays on Alexander’s technologies in chronological order:
- The Radical Technology of Christopher Alexander
- The Sustainable Technology of Christopher Alexander
- The Pattern Technology of Christopher Alexander
- The Living Technology of Christopher Alexander
- The “Wholeness-Generating” Technology of Christopher Alexander
Patterns in the sand caused by fresh water run-off. Photo: Martyn Gorman
The 20th century was the century of ideologies, but it all ended in mindless consumerism. So obviously, ideologies alone are not the answer, although they can hold many a truth and be a tool to unite people behind a common endeavour. Still, all this is pointless if the people do not have the right tools, or even worse, if they are using “the technologies of death”.
Comments (3)Architectural Myopia: Designing for Industry, Not People
Building, Society, Village Development — by Nikos A. Salingaros October 20, 2011
Photo by داود on Flickr
We highlight a little-understood cognitive phenomenon that may play a key role in the maladaptive failures of the modern human environment. There are implications for our future ability to integrate built environments into sustainable ecosystems. By discussing vision we mean how architects interpret what they see in front of them, not the brave new world they envision populated with their own designs.
By Michael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros (originally published on shareable.net)
1. Seeing the World Differently.
Have you ever looked at a bizarre building design and wondered, “what were the architects thinking?” Have you looked at a supposedly “ecological” industrial-looking building, and questioned how it could be truly ecological? Or have you simply felt frustrated by a building that made you uncomfortable, or felt anger when a beautiful old building was razed and replaced with a contemporary eyesore? You might be forgiven for thinking “these architects must be blind!” New research shows that in a real sense, you might actually be right.
Comments (3)The Gift of a Living Bridge
Building, Community Projects, Land, Plant Systems, Society, Soil Conservation, Storm Water, Trees — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor October 10, 2011
It seems there is a plant able to fill almost any niche. In this case Strangler Figs are painstakingly trained over generations to stop massive soil erosion in the rainiest place on earth, and, more, to create almost indestructible living pedestrian bridges which will last for centuries despite mega rain events.
You have to admire the community thinking that goes into this beautiful work. These people, walking on centuries-old living bridges, realise the gift given them by their ancestors, and so they pay it forward by donating their labour to build more, even though they won’t benefit from it in their own lifetimes. Voices from the past, perhaps, urge them to follow their predecessors’ gracious example by investing a little energy into a wondrous gift to future generations. Imagine if we could spin our culture around to think like this.
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