The Brattleboro Area Natural-building Group (BANG) will be meeting this Sunday, Jan 14th at 4pm in room 2 East of the Marlboro Tech Center (next to the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, which is across the street from the co-op). Mark and I will be bringing some videos that the group can choose from to watch and discuss:
Building With Awareness: the Construction of a Hybrid Home (At the last meeting many people seemed interested in watching this one, but concerned about the length. The running time is listed as 2 hours 42 minutes, plus we'd want to discuss which things we'd do the same way as the person in the video and what we'd do differently. So, if you're interested in this one, you might want to plan for the time and maybe bring some food to sustain you... anyone interested in a potluck??)
Blue Vinyl
Radically Simple (Jim Merkel)
Building Codes for a Small Planet (David Eisenberg)
Hands on Straw Bale
Basic Cordwood Masonry Techniques
+ various things recorded off TV, including:
an earth-sheltered rammed-earth house, cob (during construction), Wing's Castle (which Mark and I have visited - very creative reuse of materials)
Subterranean Homes
Extreme Homes Down Under (has at least two places of interest to the group if I recall correctly, would fast forward past the others)
etc...
Last meeting we watched:
Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh
an old documentary on Yemen, not readily available, showing their construction techniques for the earthen skyscrapers they've been living in for many centuries - a friend made a copy for us after acquiring it in some obscure way
Sorry about the short notice.
Looking forward to seeing you there,
Sarah
A good dozen turned out for last month's meeting on very short notice, and after a couple months of no meetings.
We chose a couple of videos from a pile Sarah brought to watch. First up, a very interesting documentary on the earthen building traditions of Yemen—including multistory earthen apartment blocks. After, Mark dug up a bunch of still photos of Yemen from his computer that he'd downloaded from somewhere or other, showing them on a screen during an engaging group discussion.
Then, a documentary about a village in the Himalayas called Ladakh, and the changes that are happening to its traditional ways of living in the face of "progress." Kind of a downer, but important stuff.
