Our built environment is an extension of ourselves...

It is the dwellings, systems, and tools we create to increase the many fruits of our labor while decreasing the efforts made to achieve comfort. And it is our core ethic to design and build these tools and systems so that they profit not only ourselves, but all the species of our world. It is absolutely possible to create ecological restoration through the right building practices and the right tools.

To achieve this holistic restoration for both ourselves and our planet we seek to understand the relationships between elements of the natural world’s own evolved landscape. The ultimate designer is mother nature. By identifying and understanding the relationships and patterns in nature, we can attempt to recreate them in our lives, in our backyards, in our cities, and in our broader regional infrastructure.

The key to mother nature’s architecture is in its complexity of cooperative relationships, where the needs of one system link to the yields of others. As designers, our role is to intelligently set up these mutually cooperative relationships, observe their interactions, and encourage the emergence of ever more complex communities. As complexity increases, systems achieve self-organization.

The forests, including both those on land and those of coral under the sea, are the highest expression of nature’s cooperative design. Ultimately, our towns and cities should function as forests, relying on energy from the sun and the wind and the friction of the earth, promoting diversity and rewarding symbiosis, reusing and recycling nutrients, all while creating habitat.

Follow the links to learn more about various natural buildings and efficient tools that we can design and build into our living spaces and landscapes.

Passive Solar Hot Water Heaters

Features
Greenhouses
Chicken Structures
Water Catchments
Root Cellars
Trellises and Arbors
Green Roofs
Graywater Systems
Rain Gardens
Water Filtration
Weatherization
Outdoor Ovens
Solar Showers
Worm Bins
Rocket Stoves
Windbreaks
Shade Plantings
Straw Bale Construction
Living Walls
Trombe Walls