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Casting Call: Design/Build Collective Forming PA/VT
- Street: rural
- City: Central PA/Northern VT
- State: Vermont
- Country: United States
- Zip/Postal Code: 17074
- Listed: January 26, 2012 6:50 am
- Expires: 6 days, 14 hours
Description
EA is a place-making collective presently situated in central Pennsylvania but on its way to northern Vermont. The collective’s members have been crafting custom, sustainable dwellings for the last six years and possess over thirty years of experience design/building conventional structures. Our communal workshops, living spaces, and gardens are situated on eight acres in a rural setting. We are currently looking for two to four new members to grow and evolve the collective’s social research as well as its design/build methodologies and production abilities. Our present workload consumes much of 2012, thereafter, we are planning to relocate the collective to northern Vermont to develop a larger-scale, community-based social project.
There are no formal positions or corporate bodies to the collective to which to apply to since we tend to eschew corporate entities. We do not approach building as ‘business’ nor view one’s worth or purpose as service to profit seeking. The nature of the collective’s structure is largely un-legal and egalitarian. Our internal economy is primarily gift and matriarchal. The collective is a communal life situation and does not offer the prospects of a ‘job’ to which one secures money to fund one’s ‘lifestyle’ independent of the collective’s life and work. Nor do we exist to advance one’s career ambitions. Collective life requires commitment to an evolving process, to work, to social life, skill and knowledge development outside the traditional experience of work and the conventional range of design/build skills.
Our design/build activities are inspired and guided by many sources but of particular interest to us are the ideas and practices articulated by Christopher Alexander in his Production of Houses, A Pattern Language, and in particular, The Nature of Order series. The buildings we create are designed and built collaboratively, largely handcrafted, using local materials whenever possible that are natural or found/re-purposed. Nearly all work is completed by ourselves and our clients with minimal subcontracting. The design process is fluid and unfolding, a non-linear, non-rational and we endeavor to produce socially and ecologically integrated buildings specific to our clients needs, to the landscape as well as generating meaningful, sustaining work for ourselves.
We are NOT seeking only those with design/build skills and experience although those in possession of such things are of key interest to us. We are far less interested in who one is under the present circumstances, what you’ve done, and where you are in life, than what one can become within a unique set of challenging circumstances. An interest and affection for people, place-making and craft as well as an open, thoughtful and critical mind is all that is needed. That said, all skills and levels of experience are worthy of consideration, but if we were to have a wish list, we would be particularly interested in timber-framers/wood workers with shop skills and experience, ‘natural builders’ with plaster and masonry experience, and artisans and craft-workers with ceramic and metalworking experience. Labor of all kinds is always valued.
We are also interested in disaffected refugees from the formal wasteland of architecture or those with some formal design skills or architectural education/experience. Anyone from an anthropology or sociology department bored with ‘objectivity’ and the profound limits of academia as well as crazed theater people are all persons of interest. If you can play music that is a plus. We are open to those from many kinds of situations – those with no resources to those with too much. However, the dominate ideology of Individualism is of little interest us so the self-absorbed ego tends to be an unwelcomed force in the landscape. We also love children and homeschool/unschool a small band that is always running wild around us, so families and single parents, dysfunctional or otherwise, are especially welcome.
If you are interested in this way of life, email us at collective.eabuild (at)gmail.com , tell us your story and include your CV/work history if you have one, photos and any other tidbits of interest. We will kindly return the effort and with greater detail.
Ad Reference ID: 5994f21667cb3eed
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Hello to the folks at EA,
My name is Jenna. I came across your intriguing post as I was searching the web for sources of large amounts of recycled polystyrene. My husband and I, along with our wonderful and wily 5 yr old unschooler, are in the planning stages of a cob-sandwich style home we are going to be building this summer on our bit of no-building-coded acreage in Northern Maine. Our hopes are to expand cob’s potential in cold climates, and the code free thing is just too good to pass up!
We have been tossing around the idea of intentional community living, but it is nothing that we are ready to jump into immediately. Your endeavors at a place making initiative sound awesome. We are pretty much freaks (in a fun way) in our community in Maine. It is kind of fun to be very different and hope to inspire others in the community to embrace a more holistic, nature based, post consumer mind set….but also very, very lonely at times.
My husband Tim and I both thoroughly love building with cob. We have been hoping to find work experiences with natural building to help rebuild communities. I also have a feeling that cob workshops would be a great success in drug/alcohol rehab, prison settings, etc. Hopefully as I gain more experience in natural building I will be able to create (with others) these kinds of opportunities…..
I could go on and on about us, but not sure how much you’d like to hear. We are in North Central Pa for all of March and would be happy to come down and visit if that sounds good to you.
I would love to hear as much as you would like to share about your building and community initiative. It is exciting to know that there are bands of like-minded folks joining hearts and hands to make positive and sustainable change a reality!
Jenna