Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Wednesday, March 19, 2003Project Update and Other Interests
Recently, two colleagues at the Space Environment Ecovillage project made the very generous offer of building a cob cottage for me at the SEE site. Unfortunately, the pollution, climate, and extreme seasonal pollen of the location in Bastrop Texas made that infeasible. Joining an eco-village or similar intentional community would be a good idea for someone like me -assuming the general architecture could non-toxic requirements. It's just my luck that these kinds of offers have only come from outside the US and/or locations that are otherwise unsuitable. Of course, I have no personal problem with relocating to other countries. It's just that other countries and the US Social Security Administration seem to have problems with it, presenting bureaucratic obstacles that amount to a wall of Catch-22s that bar anyone who is disabled and not independently wealthy from leaving this country.
A reader to this site recently wrote to suggest that pumice-crete construction could be much easier and cheaper to work with than I had at first thought. If any readers can suggest some books on this particular method of construction or sources of recycled or very cheap modular formwork I would appreciate hearing from you.
In other news, this week I was pleasently surprised to receive a free pop-rivet gun as a prize for my entries to the recent Emhart/NASA design competition. Only problem is that they never told me which of my two entries earned me this prize. It was either for the Geode monolithic ceramic tablet computer or the Mozart all-audio-interface portable computer. I suspect the former because I deliberately excluded illustrations for the latter from the entry on the premise that I wanted people to focus on the premise of its all-audio user interface. Alas, the Emhart contest web page didn't share anything but the titles for the key prize winners.
I've been considering the idea of using rivkels (a kind of screw socket in a rivet made in Germany) as a superior way to attach removable fixtures to the interior of insulated shipping containers and for demountable attachment of foam-core metal roof paneling to frame structures without penetration of the outer metal skin. This tool will come in handy for experimenting with this.
