Natural Building Design/Build Intensive

Saint Laurent Sous Coiron, France

In this intensive two-week workshop students will experience a full-spectrum natural building project that they assist in designing and developing for our hosts at the Art Farm. We’ll spend the first few days thoroughly analyzing our host site, getting to know the climate, topography, water movement and availability, land use patterns and available natural materials while concurrently exploring the building and structural needs of our hosts. With this information, we’ll participate in a group design intensive, developing an ecological building design that is appropriately suited to these parameters. The remainder of the course (approximately ten days) will be spent building our collective design using locally available, natural materials including stone, clay, sand, fiber, wood and more. We will explore and experiment with a number of different natural wall systems including cob, straw bale, wattle and daub, dry laid stone, and light straw clay and examine their respective pros and cons in a range of climates. Through lectures, slide shows and most importantly, hands-on construction, we’ll experience all aspects of the building process, including foundations, walls and roofs and take a deeper look into building science with a particular emphasis on siting, insulation/thermal mass, passive solar design, super-efficient wood heating systems and the design of functional, energy-efficient small structures. Finally, recognizing that buildings do not exist in isolation from other aspects of our environment, the workshop will be taught within a broad, permaculture-inspired framework, thereby creating connections between the structure and function of our buildings within the wider world. $1780. Contact 802 999-2768. Web site: http://sgnb.com/learn .