Open E Land

Europe boats some ancient and important earth buildings, from the Alhambra to Weilburg where a seven story rammed earth building constructed in 1828 is still in use Today, earth building is enjoying something of a renaissance: rammed earth is being used the signature, structural and environmental core of prominent new public buildings, building regulations for earth are becoming standardised, books such as the Gernot Minke’s Creative Commons licenced Building with Earth are helping spread information about the techniques and open source CEB presses like the OSE design are making equipment affordable.

To this end GeoCreate web site and associated Earthbuild mailing list have been created to help support earth building in Europe. If you are interested in getting involved, please sign up.

For the benefit of those not able to make camp and for those thinking of organising a similar event here is a summary of what happened and what we learnt.

Our original idea was hold a two week summer camp during which we would construct the physical infrastructure, including a multipurpose strawbale building, to allow the site to be used as full time European open source ecology project space. A few weeks into preparations it became apparent it would require a substantial battle to get planning permission to construct anything and take a minimum of six months to get approval – a depressing reminder of the obstructive inertia of governments attempting to preserve existing economic and agricultural models.
Continue reading →

Just a quick reminder: the camp is now full, and unable to accommodate any more people.

The following updated timetable should be taken only as a guide as to when some events will be running. Some will run over longer periods. Due to numbers we will probably be repeating some workshops. This will be decided during the camp. Some workshops will be in English or Spanish only, but we will help with translation and handouts as much as possible.

The updates to the timetable are as follows:

Unfortunately Juanlu Trujillo can no longer come so the oven construction workshop has been cancelled. Fire restrictions may have also prevented us from running this workshop anyway.
The solar hot water workshop may or may not be happening, depending on being able to source local materials.

Zach Hoken may make it here on Monday 5th. If so we will be running a 3D printing workshop then.

Maria Martinez will be giving an illustrated talk about Adobe/Superadobe construction.

Ariel del Sol will be giving a talk about landscapes and public spaces applied for social change, as yet unscheduled.

Daniel Connel will be giving a workshop on building a WiFi/3G internet reflector dish.

I will be giving a practical workshop using some of the material from Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands.

A very proud moment … two whole days before the workshops begin!

Lots to say about lessons learned from the construction of the press and the soil on site, but these will have to wait until after camp.

Less than one week until camp so just a quick round up of recent progress.

The big news is the new composting toilet is finished and is in use. It was constructed from OSB sheets and probably cost around 100 euros to build. We’ll be posting the drawings and photographs for the design online when we get a chance to catch up on documentation.

The other significant news is the dome has been completely recovered. Open E Land can get quite windy and hot, so we had to take this in into account. The design used was multiple, smaller, overlapping tarps which could be tensioned with ropes and metal wire on the inside of the frame triangles to stop the tarps flapping about so much. The roof pentagon is covered in mesh to let hot air escape and there’s a separate tarp to go on top in case of heavy rain. This is the third attempt to covering the dome and definitely the best so far. Again, we’ll upload some documentation when get a chance.

Alicja has been making very nice signage and her work can now be seen around the camp site:

Finally, our fund raising campaign is up and running. So far we’ve raised just over half of our target and we’ve already started buying items from the list – see below our new water container. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.

Unfortunate news is that Juanlu who was due to teach the oven building workshop has had to cancel, so we’ll be reworking the camp timetable over the next day or two accordingly. Details will be posted here when available.

With less than two weeks until the Open E Land summer camp we are very busy organising and getting the site prepared.

There has been a lot of interest in the camp and if everyone who has registered turns up our infrastructure will at its outer limit. With this in mind we are looking to raise around €800 to improve infrastructure for the camp. Details of the campaign and what we would like to spend this on are given below.

Update: ChipIn widget above is not updating. We have so far raised 25% of our target. Thank-you to everyone who has contributed so far.

Continue reading →

There’s now a map showing some of the easier public transportation options from Madrid to the OEL site:

View How to get to Open E Land in a larger map

And a message board for arranging ride shares / travel partners etc:

http://piratepad.net/openeland-rideshare

If you have any questions about anything, please let us know.

Due to an unexpectedly high level of interest in our camp we have had to suspend registration for the moment. If spaces become available we will post a message here.