Forms and Pours

Pouring the form.

The Closet In Progress

Ransom Ranch

Ransom Ranch
Sulfur Springs Valley
Arizona



Marcia Gibbons and her sustainable arts.
http://marciagibbons.wordpress.com/

Work Day

There are many people who look to learn about sustainable living in the desert and take time to gather together and share ideas. Helping each other to appreciate and create shelters, structures and lives. The more people, the quicker the process. Most of the group days consist of mixing, packing and tamping along with loads of sharing, chatting playing and eating.

Thalia Kazakos along with her friend Aubry, helped break ground on the closet at
Margia Gibbons Ransome Ranch

http://rawculturecollective.wordpress.com/

Standing Together to create and build up artistic designs in spirit.

Envisioning the beauty of what we can create.

Homework

As a student in a very interdisciplinary, self-motivated learning spectrum, I find my life filled with home work.
When it feels overwhelming to read endless pages of information on ecological economics or to explore my mathematical brain, I open HomeWork.

When turning to any page, I am confronted by a plethora of inspiring structures which have been built, by hand.

The pages that send connected chills throughout my being are smack in the middle and carry a large tone of understanding. An aerial image of a Shabono in Venezuela photographed by Yoshio Komatsu.

This structure is inhabited by the reclusive Yanomami Amerindians in a remote part of the Amazon jungle.

Yanomamö means "human being" in their native language.








Shabono - a hut in a cleared section of the jungle built with the cleared resources. A conical or rectangular wood palisade covered by a thatched roof with a hole in the middle.

SHELTER

There are doors
that want to be free
from their hinges to
fly with perfect clouds

There are windows
that want to be
released from their
frames to run with
the deer through
back country meadows.

There are walls
that want to prowl
with the mountains
through the early morning dusk.

There are floors
that want to digest
their furniture into
flowers and trees.

There are roofs
that want to travel
gracefully with
the stars through
circles of darkness.

~Richard Brautigan

Local Inspiration as Inception

Marcia Gibbons and Todd Bogatay are two people living in the high desert of Southern Arizona. They are builders, visionaries and evolutionary. They are who I have looked up to when it comes to a new understanding of development.

Top Photo - Todd Bogatay's Home at the Skygate Ecommunity
Middle Photo - Todd and Marcia and the Closet
Bottom Photo - Marcia Gibbons' Earthbag Dome Home in the Sulfur Springs Valley