design, build, learn. repeat.

Ultimate in Nola

To expand our small circle of Gulf Coast ultimate frisbee friends, Doug, Jesse, Alan, other Doug and I went to New Orleans on Saturday afternoon to play a couple games and spend a day in the city. We met up with a group of players from New Orleans and, despite the heat and brief rain, we had at least 14-15 people and played for about 2 hours on the Fly, a grassy area between Audobon Zoo and the levee with a great view of the Mississippi River. It was an excellent time. For anyone interested in playing with us, the …

Read more

Lighthouse Restoration

Scaffolding has gone up around Biloxi’s iconic lighthouse as the city begins a $400,000 restoration project that involves lead abatement, repainting, and restoration of the brick-lined interior and a wrought iron fence. From the City of Biloxi: The project is significant because the storm-ravaged Biloxi Lighthouse — erected in 1848 — has come to symbolize the city’s resilience, standing tall amid the debris in the days after Katrina. In 2007, two years after the storm, the likeness of the lighthouse was chosen for an award-winning Mississippi license tag. Today, the flag-draped lighthouse remains one of the most-photographed icons in the …

Read more

A House for Lorena

The rebuilding efforts of many Gulf Coast non-profits have been proceeding slowly lately as some funding sources have dwindled and others, such as funding from the Mississippi Development Authority, have been slow to materialize. Yet progress is still being made. One of my houses, in Long Beach, is being funded by its owner and is moving forward thanks to the efforts of International Relief and Development and Training U, a construction training program. The house is for a lady named Lorena and features two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The compact design also includes a screened porch (see below). The plan …

Read more

Rural Studio

Several months back, in early May, I visited the Rural Studio for their end-of-term closing ceremonies and pig roast. A program of Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction, the Rural Studio is embedded in rural Hale County, Alabama. Throughout Hale County, the Rural Studio puts architecture students to work designing and building creative, low-cost, high-quality solutions to the needs of rural communities. Auburn/Rural Studio alumni Jessie and Britton led us on an amazing three-day tour of this special place.

Read more

A Low Impact Woodland Home

Head over and check out A Low Impact Woodland Home — a beautifully crafted, organic, environmentally friendly house in Wales. Its approach to green building is about as far from LEED as you can get. Imagine how it would be to live in a house you had designed and built yourself, in four months, for only $5,000? In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to …

Read more

Snakebit

Via BUILDblog: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgNd2_X2-ko] Website: www.snakebitfilm.com

Read more

Author Archives

vince