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By Christopher Alexander. Original text here . Published at P2P-Foundation on 2nd April 2015. Almost every building mass visible in this picture, from the town of Trondheim, is a rectangle in plan. THE BASIC SHAPE OF BUILDINGS It is true that there are round igloos in the arctic, round wigwams among the plains , rounded mud huts in the Camerouns. Nevertheless, the vast majority of all good buildings, all over the world, for millenia, have been either: rectangular, or near rectangular, or compositions in which rectangles form coherent groups so that one rectangle leans off the next. shaped by the shape of the boundary or nearby public way, even when it is curved or acute-angled. The recent fashion for oddly shaped buildings has come about, for three main reasons: First, because people have wanted to separate themselves from the sterile architecture of the 20th century, and somehow, by using more complex shapes, they think they will “do better”.  Second, it...

Ah, akkurat slik skulle det vært i Grythengen😍😄😭 Relatert Permaculture Miracles in the Austrian Mountains The Agro Rebel Agrarrebellen Sepp Holzer

This is one of the best documentaries about Community Supported Agriculture, Community Land Trusts and Community Currencies! COMING HOME: E.F. Schumacher & the Reinvention of the Local Economy from Christopher B. Bedford on Vimeo . “COMING HOME: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy, is a new 37 minute film that tells the story of a series of revolutionary innovations by the community of Great Barrington, MA to address, at the local level, some of the economic challenges of our nation’s current hard times. In 1973, British economist E.F. Schumacher wrote “Small is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered”, – a book that offered a vision of an economy driven by a desire for harmony, not greed; a local economy based on community and ecological values, not global financial derivatives. In the 1970s, “Small is Beautiful” helped launch a back-to-the-land movement that is the ancestor to the Local Food Revolution of today. For the last three decades, th...

By contrast, think of enduring historical areas in London, Paris, or Rome, for example. There, two-millennia-old architecture has been repeatedly revived very successfully, and then endured over centuries: Romanesque, Renaissance, Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian. These buildings, most already lasting usefully for over a century or more, are much loved and still used today — indeed, they comprise some of the most expensive and sought-after real estate in the world. But under the strange ideological radicalism of Modernism, we must never, ever, build such places again! Instead we are condemned to live in a world bereft of pattern, shorn of history and humanity, left only with cold industrial objects. We are promised that someone with sufficient skill (the genius architect) has somehow made them compositionally handsome, but that hope is not enough. Methods of architectural design — especially those that revive or re-incorporate any motifs and geometric characteristics that might ha...

Extract from Charles Siegel’s free e-book:  Unplanning: Livable Cities and Political Choices Original article  here . Published at P2P-Foundation  here . Visually, it is best for a city to have a height limit of no more than six stories for fabric buildings. This is the scale that gives visual coherence to traditional European cities, where the cathedral and perhaps the campanile stand out above the urban fabric. We have a similar coherent scale in Washington D.C., where the Capitol dome and Washington Monument stand out above the urban fabric. It is also possible for a city to be visually coherent with a height limit of as much as twelve stories for fabric buildings, if it has symbolic buildings or towers large enough to give it a strong visual identity. With fabric buildings much higher than twelve stories, though, a city is bound to be dominated visually by a crowd of faceless high-rises, like most modern American downtowns; it can still work well as a city, but i...

Download first chapter  here (pdf) Author and co-author: Terje Bongard, Researcher at Norw. Inst. for Nature Research, Eivin Røskaft, Professor in biology at the Norw. Univ. of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Emailing addresses: terje.bongard@nina.no and eivin.roskaft@bio.ntnu.no Telephone Terje Bongard: +4798644786 Fax: +4773801401 An extract of first chapter: “The biological Human Being – individuals and societies in light of evolution” A COMPLETE PICTURE ”…everything is connected to everything else” Norway’s former prime minister, leader of the Brundtland commission, Gro Harlem Brundtland In a moment of clarity, Gro became famous for this overstatement, which is nevertheless true in its essence. Through human battles over truth, artificial walls are built between nature, culture and individuals. A holistic view of knowledge is now becoming an essential requisite for finding global solutions to the many threats humanity faces in the coming dec...

By Jay Walljasper from On the Commons . Published at P2P-Foundation here . Public health and community health linked in three projects in the Twin Cities There is growing recognition in the medical field that maintaining good health means more than taking care of yourself and getting regular medical check ups. Healthy living conditions and strong community cohesion foster healthy neighborhoods, while inequality, discrimination, crime, pollution, traffic, isolation, and a sense of powerlessness contribute to disease. It’s difficult to improve people’s overall health without addressing the social, economic and racial issues where they live. The image is from  Sørum Økogrend , Norway Indeed, you can think of health as a commons in which we all have a stake in maintaining. A book by Walljasper In many low-income communities, for instance, residents make more visits to emergency rooms and participate less in preventive health programs. There is less access to health...

SWEDISH GRACE Exhibition (Winter 2014) from Jackson Design GmbH on Vimeo . Swedish Grace A period of Swedish neoclassical design and crafts spanning the 1920's On view November 14, 2014 - February 14, 2015 in Berlin Swedish Grace had been a brief yet substantial moment that emerged in the 1920’s and came to represent a brilliant mix of classicism and architectural details. Architecture, interior design, and crafts were defined by simplified shapes and purity of composition -- a huge step away from nationalism and Jugendstil. A young and talented generation of architects and designers looked back to classicism and their own Nordic traditions, and created an incredibly modern vernacular style characterized by timeless proportions, luxuriously superb handcraft, and playful details. Swedish Grace had multi-layered objectives; while maintaining a social agenda, it appealed to the cultural and economic elite of the day through the production of high quality design. In additio...

Jay Walljasper writes, speaks, edits and consults about creating stronger, more vital communities.  He is author of The Great Neighborhood Book and All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. Tolfa in Italy, a town made for walking. Few things in life relieve stress, instill creativity and boost health and more than taking a stroll. “Walking is a man’s best medicine,” Hippocrates declared in the 4th Century BCE. “To solve a problem, walk around,” St. Jerome advised during Roman times. “When we walk, we come home to ourselves,” observes Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. This ancient wisdom is now backed up by modern science. A flurry of recent medical studies document the physical and mental health effects of walking as little as 30 minutes a day. “The human body is designed to walk. Humans walk better than any other species on earth,” explained George Halvorson—former CEO of the healthcare network Kaiser Permanente—at the 2017 National Walking Summit in St. ...

Wendell Berry. Photo: David Marshall "For more than forty years, Wendell Berry has worked his family farm in Kentucky the old-fashioned way, using horses as much as possible and producing much of his own food. And he has published more than forty books, writing by hand in the daylight to reduce his reliance on electricity derived from strip-mined coal. Berry has been called a “prophet” by the New York Times, and his Jeffersonian values are so old they can appear startlingly new. His strong pro-environment position has made him something of a cult hero on the Left, as have his antiwar sentiments, which have grown sharper over the years. His 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” published in Harper’s, led some to accuse him of being antitechnology, a Luddite. For his part, Berry has criticized environmentalists for not working to protect farms as well as wilderness. His stout self-reliance and unabashed use of moral and religious language in his writing have endear...

Litt skrot på Lena som snart skal skufles vekk og erstattes med maskiner for å leve i, helt i tråd med Le Corbusiers ånd! Kanskje på tide å omdøpe Lena til Lenini, da kommunepolitikerne på Østre Toten synes å ha samme sinnelag og syn på arkitektur, som Lenin. Skrotet som er avbildet her, er da altså den gamle jugend-villaen Solbakken til komponist Leif Solberg, omtalt som en såkalt identitetsbolig. Men hva skal vi med identitet, vi er jo bare komponenter i den store maskinen alle sammen, og trenger således verken identitet eller skjønnhet i våre liv! "I serien “”Modernismen er uskyldig” og andre eventyr”. Fra “L’Eprit Nouveau” av Le Corbusier: (Vi må) “se på huset som en maskin for å leve, eller som et verktøy”. OBOS og Selvaag nikker antagelig anerkjennende. Og om Paris skriver han: “Tenk om alt dette skrotet, som fram til nå har lagt seg over jorden som en tørr skorpe ble revet og kjørt bort og erstattet av enorme glasskrystaller som stod 200 meter høye!”" - Saher Sourouri ...