For a collection of stories to follow-up/add on to Dig Your Hands in the Dirt, take a look at this site, put together by Georgie Donais, which includes stories from: Bill & Athena Steen Candy Vanderhoff Daniel Frenkel/Chelsea Sprauer Ed Raduazo Georgie Donais Janine Björnson jonah vitale-wolff Kat Sawyer Kiko Denzer Nobuho Nagasawa Rainer Warzecha Sasha Rabin PROJECT stories include: Albany Free School oven Always Becoming Bambo Dome Beauty and utility Dufferin Grove Park Earthworks Projects . . .
Rainer Warzecha, sculptor, oven mason, collaborator, Germany
Some years ago now, I got an unexpected email from Elke Cole, a German-born architect now living in Canada, whom I had originally met at the first Natural Building Colloquium in Oregon, in the mid 90s. Elke was traveling in Germany, where she’d come across a public art project in a park in Berlin. It was full of earthen sculptures made by a German artist named Rainer Warzecha. At the time, I was collecting stories and photos to expand a little pamphlet about earthen art projects (Dig Your Hands in the Dirt). But most of what I had were small scale projects: benches, ovens, and things . . .
A yurt of sticks and mud
2011 has been a year of yurts, w/two opportunities to try out this simple design of sticks and mud -- a more permanent adaptation of the traditional, portable, Mongolian design. One was for a friend and neighbor. The other was a workshop at Aprovecho Institute, as part of their sustainable shelter building series. Lots of people helped! Both were made with locally harvested bamboo and fir poles (arranged reciprocally to make a self-supporting, conical roof w/a central skylight, which I'm still trying to figure out how to cover cheaply...) If you click on the photo below, you'll go to a little . . .