d. Buildings

Traditional buildings are small here and living was mostly out-door.

Julio with a stone construction

We will be exploring what our actual indoor space needs are over the years, so the priority is to restore the existing buildings whilst keeping options open as regards to their final functions (eg. the old stone pig shed is now a tool shed/workshop, but can be turned into a bedroom or a small bakery in the future. The water-collecting roof surface area is an important factor of all buildings, as are the structures we will need to collect rain water.

There is a 5x5x5m water tank downhill and other parts of the old farm have the up-hill tanks - we hope some time in the future these parts will be brought by collaborators and we can re-unify these ancient (and very well designed) structures.

Good old water-harvesting structures were destroyed by ignorance (lack of seeing them) by past tenants and some are non-recoverable, so we are modifying them.

Indoor Space

At the present time (2009) we are working to keep the stone buildings as shared space and to supply small individual domes (a little bigger than a dome tent) to fit in with the each-student-has-a-house + garden + forest garden plan.

This works well as a possible future permanent members accomodation also, and selects for ‘voluntary simplicity’ colaborators to the project (each would buy a share corresponding to one of the 8 colours in the map.

There is also a kitchen space, still mostly open-air and placed on the far side of the farm from La Casita in order to shape a Zone 1 across the gardens valley to join up most of the farm (and avoid ‘blind spots’).

Restoration

We have no stone-building skills amongst us on the farm, but the locals (palmeros) are famous for these, although it is a struggling ancient craft nowadays (like so many of the traditional skills).

We know of only a few good stone-builders who have young aprendices and try to support them in keeping this skill alive in the most effective way we know of: by employing them (as opposed to ourselves doing their work).

The only real disadvantage to the traditional building is that they are damp and cold in winter, so we plan to install K’ang Ovens apropiate to each building, and also the traditional vine shaded porches to cool them in winter.

Innovation

One of the ‘unpopular’ design choices we have made has been to try to insist that if there are any new buildings made that they should be 99% made of rubbish produced on the Island - and in so doing have added another ‘pre-level’ to the scale of recouces: 0) resources that pollute if not used,

We argue that good energy accounting would mean trying to use those before going to the next level.

The current experiments are with cardboard on an iron soldered structure, with a 30cm layer of plastic sheet on top and 7cm of papel-maché on the inside (to absorb moisture), with good ventilation aided by a chimney to which a clay stove will be attached for winters.

There is a page on these Domos in the Finca Luna design wiki.