The first substantial alternative building book I read was "The Hand-Sculpted House", all about building with cob (a clay mud, sand, straw mixture)! Like I have found is true for most alternative building books, it was not only a book for building, but a philosophical book for life! I love the things I learn from these books!
Then there are Michael Reynolds' earthships, made out of dirt pounded into old tires. I love how his book starts out with beings of light finding incapatability with other living things in humans, and deciding to become human in order to influence us. Beautiful spirituality. I will never forget the picture I saw of divers in the ocean, completely surrounded by old tires, as Reynolds testified that these were the building materials currently readily available on earth.
Birdwings
Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you are bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralysed.
Your deepest presence is in every small
contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
From The Essential Rumi Coleman Barks with John Moyne - See more at:
http://allspirit.co.uk/rumibirdwings.html
And the poetry of Rumi, that I only accidentally found when looking for more books on Ceramic houses by Nader Khalili. I love Nader's writing as well, and found it very enjoyable to read "Sidewalks on the Moon" with my son. It is a book about his life, including his upbringing in Iran. It was so nice to be able to see into his life and culture (his writing really pulls you in), especially right now with all the people with guns over there.
But my favorite architectural book, as far as spiritual philosophy, is not necessarily an alternative building methods book. True, it does bemoan the state of affairs that have brought us to unused mowed lawns surrounding suffocatingly monotonous ticky tacky houses. But it is not about building with mud, garbage, or even underground. It is about what is built, the way the design of a building affects our whole lives.
Here it talks of the kitchen as the soul of the house. How a large friendly kitchen is important for happiness in life. How preparing food together is just as important as eating food together, and how the atmosphere a home creates around a table can make people want to linger, and turn eating food from a chore that is quickly done, to an experience that changes your whole life.
Gordon Neufeld goes further to explain how parents being the source of food for their children, strengthens the family relationship. This is hard in the culture of this time and place to imagine that we are the source of anything for our children. Food, knowledge, entertainment, is all promoted as needing to be instantly available to everybody. But missing in it all is love. I used to think that I was indoctrinating my kids with a love of books and reading, because when I really sit down and spend time with them that we both enjoy, it is when we are reading books together. But this is no more a means of indoctrination than mealtimes together are. In the chaos of rapidly changing cultures that is accelerating in our modern reality, family naturally still finds its crevices to hold on to. And the actions we perform, without need to analyze and judge them as healthy or not, naturally fulfill the roles our children need them to.
Yesterday we all got in the car together as what the toddlers refer to as "the whole big family". It was just a short drive to the library before it closed for the night, but it was my most enjoyable experience of the day. When we are all in the car together, we don't have outside distractions. We talk and laugh and joke together, and a calmness and security settles over even the most begrudging siblings who have fought that day, and we realize how much we really like being together, how much we really love each other.
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