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Bottle insulation for a yurt floor

March 18, 2014

Rusty Orner, of Quiet Creek Farm, in PA, took the idea of insulating an oven floor with recycled beer bottles and applied it to a yurt he was building as a classroom and bunk space for students and interns. On leveled ground, they made a rubble trench, covered with gravel bags and capped with mortar and slate, to support the lattice walls of the yurt. They filled the thirty foot diameter donut with packed shale, a thin layer of sand, and then 5,000 beer bottles. The empty bottles provide four inches of insulation and a thermal break to keep cold from migrating into the floor. Rusty . . .

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1 Comment · building tech, stories: building, earth, arts, Tech, the work of art

Hug Hut at Muddy Creek School, Philomath

May 24, 2012

Muddy Creek charter school in Philomath commissioned this mud project as the initial step in creating an "outdoor classroom." All 60 kids, K-5, participated in 2 days of playdough brainstorming and design, and six days of mud. Parents and neighbors contributed random prunings of willow, fruitwood, and forsythia that we wove into a rough hut; the mud came up out of a hole in the ground, and we ended up making a lovely cob bench and this "hug hut." The hut was designed to "last" for just one winter, and then get torn down so new students could make their own -- instead of taking care of . . .

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Leave a Comment · building tech, stories: building, earth, arts, Tech, the work of art

Mud Mural at Colorado State University Pueblo, with Kiko Denzer

May 21, 2012

Maya Aviña teaches fine arts at CSU in Pueblo, Colorado. For about the past ten years, she’s been immersed in natural building, which she has also made into the focus of her research at the college. Last year, she invited me to come be an “artist in residence” and do a mural project. The challenge was to bring life into dead space: a bleak, harsh, hard-edged, institutional (college) courtyard of grey and yellow concrete pressed down by massive, overhanging soffit walls of more cast concrete. It looked (and felt) like a pen in a zoo designed so the animals below couldn’t . . .

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1 Comment · Kiko's gallery, stories: building, earth, arts, the work of art

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from the publisher

Hand Print Press began in the early 90s, when I self-published Build Your Own Earth Oven. I was thinking of myself as a capital A  Artist. However, as I learned from the garden and other teachers, art just means “to fit together” — it’s how the world works — flora, fauna, humans — all must fit themselves together, with each other, with the landscape, with wind and weather. In addition to the bookstore (which now includes a few other authors), the site contains stories and updates on ovens, heat, baking, beauty, agriculture, fire, community, culture, (spoon) carving, etc. It’s all art! Thanks for visiting. You can contact me at handprint at cmug dot com, or thru instagram.
— Kiko Denzer

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