Category: Pondering

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Blog Pondering

Rural Studio

In a way this post continues my previous post on Passivhaus. I’ve had these resources open in my browser for some time and didn’t quite not in what context I should place them here on Bhudeva. Passivhaus gave me to the context that was looking for me.

Rural Homes is a project run out of Auburn University in Alabama, USA. We learned about it through Itsik Hirsch – a talented architect and teacher at the Israel Institute of Technology who also happens to be a dear person to us and my uncle. Itsik teaches what is called “studio” – which, as I understand it, is an experimental learning space which usually makes up a major part of architecture studies. It is where students do actual architectural work and gain precious practical experience. But in most cases that experience remains theoretical because their projects are not actually built.

The Rural Homes project took the “studio” in an inspiring direction. In it students are challenged to create feasible and affordable solutions for people who live in extremely poor living conditions. The challenge is not just to create a design on paper, the students actually go out and build the house themselves. It is a tremendously inspiring project that touches many people’s lives. It is a wonderful (and in my experience rare) example of academic study and research directly connecting to and benefiting the society in which it exists.

Following is an interview with the man behind this beautiful project – Samuel Mockbee:

For more information:

So what does Passivhaus have to do with all this? Very little and that is the essence of my critic of it. Rural Studio should be a reality check for Passivhaus. The greatest place for impacting both the lives of both people, the environment and this entire planet we inhabit (which are really so intertwined to the point that they are one and the same) is where most of the people are, not where a small percentage of rich people can indulge in ideology.

Our reality is somewhere in between Passivhaus and Rural Studio. I am inspired by Rural Studio and deterred by Passivhaus. I feel that Rural Studio touches my life and that Passivhaus overlooks it. Maybe I am bit too harsh towards Passivhaus and though I can speculate on why that is I will keep that to myself – it is a question I believe Passivhaus can benefit from asking.

The Rural Studio from BluePrint Productions on Vimeo.

Categories
Blog Pondering

We Are Grazing (alot)

If you happen to be visiting this blog these days you may find it to be a but … confusing? unclear? There are two things we can offer you to introduce some clarity.

The first is that you read our About page – that may give you a picture about where we want to go and what Bhudeva has to do with it.

The second is to understand that we are doing a lot of waiting grazing – it’s a great word/idea/inspiration I picked up when I was working as a photographer with improvisers. It draws inspiration from cows – they just do what they do (and they do it almost all day long) … and it works. In improvisation Grazing describes a state in which you are already in performance and yet you feel as if you have nothing to offer. When that happens and you realize that you are grazing for material then the grazing itself becomes the material. It can alleviate tensions that comes from thoughts like “I have nothing to do but I need to do something” and almost instantly transforms you into a space of doing … the doing of grazing.

We are currently in an apartment in Cluj and we have this encompassing vision of where we want to go and we aren’t sure how to get there. The most actionable task in the Bhudeva context is finding some land and a house in our vicinity. We are in the process of doing that but it isn’t very interesting and worth noting (yet!). So the rest of the time we are grazing, imagining that we are in our house and asking ourself what next? What you currently see on the website is an echo of that process. We are getting flashes of images of our house, making our own yogurt, baking our own bread, exploring ecological and sustainable building and agriculture … we are passionately pursuing whatever arises from our grazing.

On the face of it, it may not make much sense at this point, but under the surface it’s brewing ever so gently into what we believe will fill the rest of our lives. So stick around … with all this grazing we are bound to start squirting some delicious milk 🙂

Categories
Blog Pondering

Bhudeva: House

How to go about planning a house? We have so many ideas and questions – small and big details that pass through our attention. How can we collect them? How can we arrange them to give them direction? How can we share them with other people that will help us transform thoughts and words into a physical reality? …

Today we started answering these questions by launching a mini-site within Bhudeva – Bhudeva: House. This site is dedicated to the physical house we are going to build. In it we are collecting all of our thoughts, wishes, ideas, questions, inspirations … whatever comes to mind to explore and describe the house we wish to create for ourselves. It is a first concrete movement to create a specific flow of energy that will eventually manifest as a physical house.

We expect to change the arrangement of the website as we progress in our exploration – for now these are the few simple guidelines that we are using:

  1. Though there is a timeline which describes the order in which thoughts came to us – we don’t believe it to be an important or particularly informative aspect of the site. Posts are created when we approach a new idea and we may go back and edit them as more thoughts or information appears on that idea.  So if you reading this as a blog please keep in mind that posts may change long after they were first published. To us the site is more like a notepad.
  2. Categories are used to group together ideas around central functional needs – such as kitchen, living, sleeping, work, meditation, etc. By clicking a category you will see a list of posts that relate to that specific function.
  3. Tags are used to indicate recurring themes. For example we often relate to themes like space and privacy which are added as tags. By clicking on a tag you will see a list of posts in which a theme was mentioned.

Your are welcome to visit Bhudeva: House.

Categories
Blog Pondering

Eco

Words like “ecosystem” and “ecological” are so popular these days, they feel so specific and yet I challenge you to try and describe them with any specificity. I tried and failed. So I looked up just the first part – three letters “eco” and a little snooping around brought me to the greek word Oikos.

Originally the word Oikos meant “family” or “household” – a “basic unit of society”. But what I found to be even more interesting was that the use of the word morphed, I am guessing, together with society itself. It was later used to describe a larger unit of society – the city-state which was an independently governed area in ancient Greece. I am  guessing that this indicates that a core change took place in society – and that the single household lost some of its distinctive relevance in the overall view of society – something bigger was needed to make sense and bring social order.

As we begin this segment of our journey – which brings us closer then ever to creating a home – ideas such as ecology and sustainability are vibrating in our consciousness. The closer we move to the realities of a home the less obvious these ideas become. Though we are aiming to create a “self-sustaining” home – the reality of it is more complicated then it may seem. While it probably is possible to create a completely self-sustaining home – there seems to be a potential for a better life by creating a wider system that includes more people, skills and qualities. It is somewhere between a single family and an entire city 🙂

The wikipedia entry on Oikos indicates that the Greek Tragic form of theatre portrayed a conflict of values between the “family” and the “city-state” – a conflict that led to the decay of society. I can relate – I am writing these words living in an apartment in the city, looking forward to moving out to a village home. The city disturbs me – I have reservations about how well a city, as I have come to know it, actually supports life. I just finished spending some time in the kitchen – I made some carrot & apple juice and then cooked a vegetable soup. I was left with a pile of organic waste. Here in the city it becomes garbage, in the village it is food for the animals and compost to rejuvenate the land.