To bring natural homes into the 21 Century, architect Tono Mirai designed "Future House": a home that blends earth building and traditional joinery with modern design. Located in Miura, Kanagawa (about an hour and a half south of Tokyo), this fusion home was built for a businessman and his wife and 3 children.
Links: Fair Companies | Future House | Kirsten Dirksen
Designer Ryan Frank wanted a semi-mobile home for a small plot in a "sensitive area". He thought about yurts and domes, but settled for an open source design he found online. Often called a "boathouse" or "gothic arch" structure, it was originally developed by a boat builder; it's centerpiece are the wooden support ribs.
From faircompanies: Frank built the home for about 1000 euros in roughly 100 hours. He now lives in it full-time with his girlfriend, though they use a separate camper as a kitchen, as well as a separate composting toilet and outdoor shower.
It's become difficult to afford urban living in places like San Francisco, New York or even Portland, but there is an alternative. In Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Cincinnati, you can buy or rent for about 1/10th the price.
In the Jubilee year 2000 the monks of Norcia breathed new life into the birthplace of St Benedict. Armed with only their faith and zeal they founded a monastic community which has been attracting men from all over the world to follow St. Benedict's ancient Rule.
In a world gone mad, it is great to see some who have returned to less frenetic way of living.
At 80 years old, Lloyd Kahn is an icon of alternative housing. In the seventies he was a poster child of the geodesic dome (he published Domebook One and Two and he and his dome home were featured in Life magazine).
He got his start in publishing when Stewart Brand made him the shelter editor for the Whole Earth Catalog. The book that put him on the map as a publisher was “Shelter”, an international survey of alternative housing that he continues to sell over 4 decades later.
Kahn’s enthusiasm for shelter extends to “building every place I’ve ever lived”, including his current home which started as a dome and is now a more traditional shelter capped by a 30-foot-tall hexagonal tower (the only remnant of the dome).
His home is only a small part of his half-acre homestead where he and his wife Lesley Creed believe in doing things for yourself, when possible. Besides tending the organic gardens (and dozens of free-range chickens), Creed is a natural dyer, quilter, sourdough bread-maker and believer in the “value of actually working, not just trying to figure out how not to work”.
On our visit to the homestead, Kahn showed us his wild-caught pigeons, his seaweed harvest, well-fermented sauerkraut, home-cured olives, oatmeal grinder and workshop (where he still keeps his father’s “nuts and bolts box”). We caught Creed baking her sourdough bread (from her kitchen-harvested starter) and drying “bread seed” poppies.
Years ago the couple were pushing the boundaries of self-sufficiency to include goats and harvests of wheat, but Kahn found his limits. “With self-sufficiency you never get there, you never become self-sufficient. I mean we tried back in the seventies. We had goats and chickens and bees and I was trying to raise grain. Pretty soon I realized that if I want to raise enough wheat for the bread for a year here, it’s better left to a specialist, like I can’t be my own dentist. So you do, it’s a direction self-sufficiency. You do what you can do as much of it as you can.”
Shelter Publications: http://www.shelterpub.com/
Another great video from Kirsten Dirksen. Take a stroll over to Kirsten's website to learn more about living slow in a fast world.
Elio Motors. A three-wheeler capable of 84 MPG selling for only $6,800. This is our story.
Elio Motors unveils its new 0.9 liter, 3-cylinder engine prototype becoming the first start-up to build an all-new internal combustion engine in 60 years. Coming in 2016.
Has Elio Motors Conquered Perpetual Motion? Discover the mind-blowing, jaw-dropping data that proves when compared to all other forms of transportation, Elio is like never paying for fuel!
Link: Elio Motors
Sheila Cassani began farming her rental home while a college student. She started with a small vegetable patch, but it soon spread to keeping chickens and bees and planting produce on nearly every available patch of the small yard not dedicated to the poultry.
In 2012, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, released a proposal for a futuristic tube transport system that could go faster than the speed of sound, cutting travel time between Los Angeles and San Francisco to 35 minutes or less.
If the Hyperloop really happens, it could be in service before Moonbeam's Boondoggle ever sees the light of day, Imagine going down south for a day at the beach.
Italian designer Gabriele Diamanti (@GabDiamanti) has invented Eliodomestico, an eco-distiller running on solar power, to provide safe drinking-water for people in developing countries: a very simple way to produce healthy, bacteria-free water. Eliodomestico is an open source project. Winner at Core77 Design Award 2012 - social impact category; Finalist at the Prix Émile Hermès 2011 competition.
Nick Bernabe
(ANTIMEDIA) A genius yet very simple way to produce healthy, bacteria-free water.
Italian designer Gabriele Diamanti (@GabDiamanti) has invented Eliodomestico, an eco-distiller running on solar power, to provide safe drinking-water for people in developing countries: a very simple way to produce healthy, bacteria-free water. Eliodomestico is an open source project.
This ingenious distiller was the winner at Core77 Design Award 2012 – social impact category and finalist at the Prix Émile Hermès 2011 competition. For more info and to donate to this project, click here.
This article (Solar Seawater Distiller Turns Salt Water into Drinking Water Using Only Sunlight) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TheAntiMedia.org. Tune in to the Anti-Media radio show Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Help us fix our typos: edits@theantimedia.org.
