Sky IS the Limit: Sustainable Architects Transform Our Militarized World

"If all of the soldiers in all of the armies in all of the world were to put down their weapons and pick up tools and start making sustainable housing for all the people in the world, life would just begin on this planet." Michael Reynolds, Garbage Warrior, on Democracy Now!

Jorg Ostrowski and his wife Helen are two trained architects who have trail blazed sustainable housing in Canada and around the world. On April 20, Jorg opened his home on Scurfield Drive in northwest Calgary to the public, in celebration of Earth Day, for RecoSolutions, offering free tours on sustainability. “All of my projects since 1972 have been sustainable,” Jorg wrote via email. “We have built with rammed earth, straw bale, stack wall, double log, EcoStuds, prefab, Blackie Block and stick built. I have given ‘hands on’ workshops on rammed earth and straw bale in various provinces, including a 6 day workshop for the David Suzuki Foundation, in BC.” 

Arriving at the doorstep beneath the iconic sunray-painted awning above the front door, Jorg announced, “Transportation is part of the equation,” pointing to two automobiles in the driveway. Behind the Smart Car is a VW Golf that is converted to run on waste vegetable oil as part of a continuing R&D program. Recent trips to Vancouver and back, and cross-country on other excursions have cost zero dollars. People often donate vegetable oil. Japanese restaurants are reputed for the highest-grade waste vegetable oil. "The goal is to download electric and thermal energy into batteries, grid and slab," Jorg wrote. 

Along the outside porch, the most noted sustainability measures are various blue water bins collecting rainwater that goes into a cistern able to store enough water for many months, based on low consumption and average rainfall. An apparatus below the front porch is shaped like an oversized foghorn with a square container fitted inside with a cooking pot. The solar cooker concentrates enough sunlight that even in -25 Celsius on a clear day, the inside temperature rises to 100 degrees centigrade.  

Inside the home, a large office space to the left leads down a short hallway to a cozy living room reception. About ten people attended the ecoTour at three o’clock in the snowy afternoon under unlit LED lights, also fitted throughout the home. With over 140,000 guests so far in its 20-year history, the Alberta home/office is unique in Canada for not using city water, sewer, gas or furnace. The ecoHouse is heated by passive/active solar, internal heat gain and left over waste as backup. 

On any given month, schoolchildren will graduate from the ecoTour given by Jorg Ostrowski himself, chock-full of architectural knowledge (the legacy of a career spanning four decades beginning with an M.I.T. graduate education in architecture) and an astounding display of hands-on examples for small-scale, local sustainability. Beginning in the living room, natural light pours in from all angles, especially south-facing, including an “experimental window” featuring unrivalled five-pane krypton-sealed glass. On the coffee table, a seemingly unimpressive array of likely architectural samples is strewn about. As conversation ensues, each item reveals itself as highly innovative environmentally friendly material or technology, including organic wool carpet, flaxseed Marmoleum flooring, recycled newsprint insulation, and solvent-free adhesive, motorized airtight damper, and the latest LED lights, among many others. 

The moral of the story: making the home airtight is the key to conserving energy. Utilizing natural heat sources like the position of the sun, and even body temperature are integral and often underwritten in the dominant modes of contemporary architecture. A centerpiece of the home is a traditional fireplace and oven common to many European and Asian traditions, known as a Russian Stove, Korean Ondol or Chinese Kang heating systems among many other names. The fireplace is used for central backup heating and cooking, including for heating water. After priming the central heating mechanism before a recent month-long trip during the winter month of March, the empty house only lost about eight degrees centigrade without additional oversight. 

From the living room through a concave hallway into the kitchen, numerous plants line windows and vegetation of all kinds hangs from the ceiling. A beautifully set deadfall tree acts as a post for second floor beams. Allowing live trees is important to continue to absorb CO2. Especially abundant are aloe plants for their exceptional capacity to purify the air and provide a natural source for glyconutrients and medicine. The energy mainstay of the kitchen is the refrigerator. Used for only about six months in the year, an indubitably pragmatic cold closet replaces the need for a refrigerator in the cold climate, substantially reducing kilowatt-hours per year and extending the life cycle of the very energy efficient fridge/freezer right beside it. 

Next, Jorg leads the ecoTour into a personal office space, where small portholes, reminiscent of a ship’s cabin, line the wall. Behind the glass at least six examples of alternative insulation are exhibited, including sheep’s wool, an expensive though probable example. Around the house, vents are fitted to facilitate heat and air circulation, and air-to-air heat exchangers minimize heat loss.

The middle of the home features the dry compost toilets on both levels, with the upstairs fully functional for guests. The system is “not perfect” said Ostrowski, although an exemplary means to recycle human waste, and in addressing a crucial need for water management in mainstream housing infrastructure. All biological waste goes into an engineered multi-purpose year-round composting chamber, combining 3 critical household operations.

1. Major blue box recycling centre and deposit box of the house to receive all biodegradable waste, including all human and kitchen waste                                                                                                                                    
2. Major water conservation equipment to save 200,000 litres of drinking water per year (family of four)                                                                                                      
3. Fertilizer plant to produce healthy earth, and compost tea, a great liquid fertilizer

"In summary, although not perfect, it is the stomach of the house, quite efficient and critical to the sustainable future of the planet," wrote Jorg.       

Upstairs, bedrooms are designed for accessibility. Two smaller rooms on one side have a connecting doorway, to facilitate spatial linkages for small children and potential opportunities for bed & breakfast hospitality or simply an office-bedroom combination. The master bedroom is flooded with natural light from a panorama of south-facing windows tastefully mirrored, with ceiling windows, two hallways, and a catwalk built of metal grating above the living room, offering a distinctly interconnected ambiance between the master bedroom with the rest of the home. Ventilation above the center of the bed draws from the central, water-based heating system. An antique tub is installed in the adjacent ensuite, with consideration for recycling the work and material required to reuse such conventionally obsolete fixtures. With adequate attention, there is natural light enough to grow tomatoes aplenty on the windowsills. A small addition alcove to the master bedroom, located above the greenhouse, provides much needed sanctuary. 

Outdoors, solar panels are fitted on ground level around the ecoHouse with mind to wind, dust and snow that often collects on often poorly conceived roof-installations. Ground placement allows optimal accessibility in maintenance, and effectively the highest degree of energy output. 

All in all, RecoSolutions was a lesson in successful, off-the-grid sustainable housing within the limits of a major city in North America. With a single prime mover, such as the 70 HP power mechanism used in the VW Golf to provide heat and electricity for a long-distance car ride, over one hundred homes in the likelihood of Jorg Ostrowski’s ecoHouse can be sustained. These homes not only sustain renewable energy sources, but also reduce the risks of outgassing from chemicals in standard building materials, contaminants in public water and damage from power outages. Furthermore, the ecoHouse can facilitate the production of energy, exporting power back into the grid. 

The lack of sustainable housing development in Canada, especially when so willfully and ably illustrated as in the RecoSolutions ecoTour in Calgary, only adds to the shameful prerogatives of national priority. Helen Ostrowski, who co-organizes events and activities at the ecoHouse, also active with international development work in the Philippines, China and most recently Iran, among others, commented that when they were starting out in the 1970s, there was no opportunity for young people to be involved with sustainable housing in university programs, or in applying environmentally friendly architectural products as today. When they had built their ecoHouse nearly twenty years ago, the city of Calgary was uniquely open to their alternative housing development with respect to their work as two highly trained graduate architects, active and recognized in the field.    

At the end of the ecoTour, a very intelligent participant was flabbergasted that mainstream society continues to neglect the most important of these very simple and doable measures. Western lifestyle identifies human settlement first and foremost through consumer values. Modern human life is defined by consumerism, and is inextricably linked to the catastrophic waste-chains of urban and suburban housing. In the normative social and political agenda of North America, human existence depends on consumerism. True productivity and actual development does not merely contribute manufactured material to the growing waste stream but reciprocates human life with natural energy cycles.  

In the growing petro-state policies of the federal government of Canada, energy consumption far outweighs energy production. Without public awareness campaigns such as the RecoSolutions ecoTour, ignorance perpetuates the consumer mode of being as the only way of being. Yet, in this the same world as that of increasing urban sprawl, one energy/grid independent, sustainable ecoHouse illustrates how human beings also produce energy and give back to what Jorg named as the three most important points of sustainable living; clean water, healthy earth, and reusable energy. 

On June 1 and June 8, the Calgary ecoHome will be open for public tours.
Please see the Calgary ecoHome website, ASH - Autonomous & Sustainable Housing Inc. AND/OR Contact Jorg Ostrowski at ecojdo@gmail.com for more details. 

This article is also published on The Media Co-op & IndyMedia

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Authentic Greenwash by RK

The Point of Return by RK

Sky Paint by RK

Empyreal Intersection by RK

Gloom & Hollow by RK

Urban Landing by RK

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"I drank in the stupor", founded on the original Latin meaning of the word stupor, as, 'to be amazed or stunned,' the piece draws from an experience during the Day of Lady Guadalupe in Mexico, where I observed my future wife from afar as she street performed music in a city square. The overshadowing presence of Lady Guadalupe breathed the immense breath of the goddess of compassion Kuan Yin, through her Chinese zither music, and both protectresses mirrored their gaze through mine, visually and aurally with a searching heart bursting and blooming with the stupefying gift love. As French writer and philosopher Paul Valery said, "Love is being stupid together."  

Listen in to a sound art vocalization-exclamation of "I drank in the stupor" on my newest album, "Evocations: Exotic Settlers" on www.menachem.bandcamp.com, featuring an epic wave of shakuhachi improvisations. 


In two parts, A Sick Society Amuck features twelve pieces, and three original art interpretations on the theme and collection "Exotic Settlers". Four of these pieces were published in the 29th issue of Steel Bananas Quarterly "how in the year of the rabbit, the pure still need things," "I drank in the stupor," "interpretive direction," and "where is the mind in life?" 

The phrase, "sick in a sick society" is based on the spiritual wisdom of Jiddhu Krishnamurti, who said "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." So follows various observations and expressions supporting and steeped in this wisdom of seeing. Many of the pieces are satires equally on personal and collective health related to addiction and nationalism, where both divide and dismantle the health of human consciousness, which requires holism. Complementary themes of travel and history juxtapose subjection with abjection. 

A Sick Society Amuck by Rusty Kjarvik

Evocations of the Urban Creator: When No Stars Appear, Voices Are Heard

Evocations: Cyclical Wordplay (album art)

“So, dear state, you are a very nice word from a dream. There are fine sounds in the word, much comfort and much freshness, you grew up in a forest of words…ashtray, match, cigarette butt, an equal among equals, but why state do you feed on people. Why has the fatherland become a cannibal and the motherland his wife…If the states be truly bad then who among us will lift a finger to prolong their dreaming under the blanket forever?” Allen Ginsberg reading the work of Paul Klebnikov’s Manifesto of the Presidents of the Terrestrial Globe

After hearing many songs and stories of the dramatic sights seen by survivors of the great natural disasters of the early 21st century; the tsunamis and earthquakes that buckled cities and civilizations to their knees, I have heard many refer to the reversion to a clear sky.

The clarity of sky is an enduring metaphor for the wildly obscuring potency of modern technological electro-civilization. What has been more subtle, and more dramatic a transition, is how the skies under our human settlements have become opaque and starless over the past century. In my mind, this is more traumatic and in need of reflection.

The stars and constellations are being called into the blinding stretches of the ephemeral; of human memory, abstracted through an archaic imagination. Beginning with the wealth of ecological terror that might strike any human being living in a modern Western city, who looks up to see that not only have they left the stars, but the stars have left them.

We are without higher purpose, the signs directing us to a sense of greater belonging in the universe have since faded into the mindless wash of electro-magnetic consumerism and the ecological disturbance of human egotism; a symptom of our technological worldview.

________

Lost by RK

Shadow of Mother Earth by RK

Gutless City by RK 

Wormhole Cafe by RK

Parting the Starless Night by RK

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The voicing, "When No Stars Appear" is an excursion through the faded mind, a search for meaning in the depths of human language, abstracted and diluted by the hotbed movement of inorganic noise, and the harmonious serendipity that emerges with the simple act of listening; the inception of self-knowledge, wherefrom the fog clears to reveal novel human experience, metaphorically illustrated by the final lines in the voicing. At the narrative resolution, a fugitive of modernity emerges from a waterfall consciousness of humility, as a child in a traditional Mayan home, looking up into the vast network of a more universal light. And the sounds of the starlit sky become a nightly renewing gift clarity, humility and strength. "When No Stars Appear" was originally published online by PressBoardPress in September, 2012.



Also featured in this post is the release of the chapbook, "Creating in the City" from the Cyclical Wordplay collection, to commemorate the release of another sound evocation! Enjoy!

Creating in the City by Rusty Kjarvik

Sleep-Talk of the Modern Writer: A Joycean Saga, Part II

James Joyce, textorized with an excerpt from Ulysses by Maxf 

“Oliver St. John Gogarty noted that the typical modern writer was doomed to go on talking to himself but that it was left for James Joyce to go one step further and to talk to himself in his sleep in Finnegans Wake.”

From Charles Reznikoff Bio on Poetry Foundation 

Internet, technology, modernity, and history, the Joycean nightmare, the daily dream of the silenced voice, speaking in thought, imagining a placeless space of mind, the code of subjective emergency. I lay half-awake, surfing the viral webs of unreason in my sunless haunt, of trivial whereabouts and soundless frequency. An internal vibration wakes me into another dream of subconscious sleep, the inactive pause of breath. In the information age, for the modern writer, free speech is a painless bubble of thirst. My words are a mere spidery sleep-talk, spinning the collective web on and on, to perchance catch the insect eyes of innumerable minds, insights unseen, and only felt, as the nerve of a quiver.

See related post: A Joycean Saga of Psyche, Muse of Endless Night

_________

Before I went to prison I sat around a family circle. My grandfather was in his prime and all of his siblings were alive. That was the last time he put on his sailor cap. 

Portrait of a Sailor by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

A new fish stinks straight out of water. These metal bars are hot with memory. I clean past my fresh environment. There is a consensus of suicide and the death of life. I steal a look through my most haunted imagination, and it’s real. A shark-toothed man with pomade-drip hair and an orange shirt draws his own jaw. A thin, black-haired youth pierces his erect member into a cellmate. Even if I were passing straight through this corridor, it would be hell, and this is my new home. 

Prisoners Exercising by Vincent Van Gogh

I’ve returned to my grandparent’s abode. He’s dead. I wake in the middle of the night. The house is empty. I have never seen it empty in my whole life, ever. What am I doing here? The only presence is the lightless noise of my empty past.  

__________

"A secret curing,

Brewing twilight

In the motionless loss of our human presence

From the awaited future, yet eternal sound

In patient happiness breeds the contented need to produce

Chirps

To entice the sickness of pride to leave with day and unite mind

With a grateful stare into the mind’s ending"

excerpt from "City Birds"

Reflection on Preisner's "Silence, Night and Dreams"

"Dreams and silence and night are the three elements, are very important for me. I just would like to in this album give it a question for the audience. What's happened, even in the 21st century we have this completely cosmic technology, and finally our life is longer but it is not so deep like it was, you know, 10, 20 years ago. What's happened is that this technology does not help for us in our life, that we are finally more alone." - Zbigniew Preisner

"Silence that arouses anxiety. Night that envelops sadness and despair. Dreams of hope for a transformation." - Lyrics form "Silence, Night and Dreams" sung in Latin and English, from Book of Job and Gospel of St. Matthew

Reflection on "Silence, Night and Dreams" by Zbigniew Preisner

This album stopped me dead in my tracks. In a pre-evening slump of energy, I dipped down into a reclining position, to receive the fullness of a truly heartened listening experience. There was no mediation, no other attention drawn, simply and fully, I became present in the music. And it took me there. The wave-like form of the movements called me into my own being. I lay, submerged in pure sonic form. An experience not yet had swept me into a simulacrum vortex, an open mind. I slipped as it were, directly into the centre of vacuum space. As I lay in my dark room, my eyes sank in the opaque mysteries of an unearthly darkness. The sopranos melted my heart and my body of water became as the grandiose demiurge of self-awareness.

One of my favourite aspects of Preisner's music is his use of silence. The storied conceptual sacrifice of John Cage flits in my mind, and then I hear a celestial soprano. What takes me away with this recording is how the singer, Teresa Salgueiro, of Madredeus had to learn to read music solely for this collaboration with Preisner, a self-taught musician himself!

Preisner's compositional style, ever-unique, reminds me more of landscape, at once abstract, at once pointedly accurate to the infinitesimal temporality. In my ear, it skies beyond "music" as knowably defined, and in a sense becomes likened to the essence of human experience, beyond expected form, the disquiet of artistic convention. For this reason, it is a personification of dream, a direct rendering of the heart of the maker. For more listening into Preisner's dream mind, listen to "Like a Dream"

Infinitely more could be expressed, for every one of the multiple listenings I've had since the full album's played through my airwaves, though I'll let your experience and mine to be yet further fulfilled in silence, night and dreams. Such is the character of night.

_______

Night on the bus route is darker than usual. It must be a new moon, or heavy unseen cloud cover. Friends sneer at my withdrawn attitude. “What is he concealing?” the fantasize grotesque in the bored clashing of spatial insensitivity. The mood is young and innocence carries a deft presence of unsightly, childish greed. I keep to myself. “Where do I get out?” I implore into the obscure open, unrecognized concrete slabs give the lonely night its shape. We are way out past our usual neighborhoods. I am afraid, though I hardly show it. The others step down at an abandoned building leading to a bridge into parkland, a notorious breeding ground of mischief for those called into the night. I get out at the next stop. As I cross the bridge, I am encroached on all sides by my jeering friends on the bus. They ask where I’m going, what I’m doing. I simply tell them that I’ve been working at a hardware store. The tower above me, they know I’m hiding something. The hallucinogens pulsate in my sleeves with the rumble of their own palpable life, an energy known by my night wandering guests as any intoxicating scent, wafting into their needful minds with a strength beyond another human presence.

_______

Night

"If you are surrounded by night in your dreams, you may expect unusual oppression and hardships in business...To dream of night time signifies obstacles in achieving your goals. You may find that some issues you are facing are still unclear. Take more time before making a decision...extreme darkness suggests that you are hiding something or are unwilling to see things clearly...The darkness represents a lack of awareness or illumination." (iDream)

_______

"you are as a message,
complete
full
with clarity & goodness in substance

a sleeping vessel,
purified constantly with the freshest, pure oxygen
gifted from up on high

a spiritual life force known only in the most ancient virgin forests,
an ecosystem wise with earthly pleasure,
swaying to magic rhythms

you bend your heart
scaling every obstacle
materialized by mortal touch

miraculous and soothing, not tempting but calm,
an emergent glow breaks the great fever
making modern man delirious with repeated history

your very being is the cure, and every expression a sacred step
bringing us closer to a shared peace among all humanity and all universal creation,
uniting us through a creative spark"

- excerpt from "you are as a message"

The Universal Energy of Non-Violent Technology

"In the 1950s the scientists who created the atomic bomb offered a promise, by splitting the atom we could have a limitless supply of electricity that could end pollution and bring peace to the world forever, but after the disaster in Japan, that dream has never looked more like a nightmare."

- Narrator in "The Thorium Dream" 

_______

A map, from overhead, spells a loose bombing pattern over the destroyed ash of a once proud Western city. The doomsday vibe is instilled pervasively, even from twelve thousand feet. I descend. Hooded, disguised in the female clothing of a conservative Iranian Muslim woman, I defy gravity, bounding over farmyards and plains with ghastly unconcern for my step. American, I daydream momentous bravery in the hook of Ali, the most famous American Muslim. Finally, I arrive to a gathering of young people my age. Crowding around a midday fire, we clumsily fiddle with various instruments. Curiously, I see an old friend. People begin to single me out. “Play this! Play that!” They stammer, belligerent with string and reed instruments sounding off into unbroken landscapes, the sobering spring sky presses coldly on my uncovered scalp. Every instrument I touch is in disrepair. Unable to make a clear sound, I move on to alcohol. 

_______

Ash

"Dreaming of ashes omens woe, and many bitter changes are sure to come to the dreamer. Blasted crops to the farmer. Unsuccessful deals for the trader. Parents will reap the sorrows of wayward children." (iDream)

_______

nervous mule-packed, people's spread,
glum rising, toward peak's,
unearthed sudden, as an island explosion,
tectonic wires flattening,
the disbelieving abortion!

the worshipped spring,
overloaded with unfound substance,
anonymity, in a human non-being,
a wasted mold, singing on the harmonious road,
to the past, when the all-encompassing now,
expressed self to a universal song

archaic, yet everlasting
and then, always gone,
fizzed out in the solar flare

pop flash, grazed heat from the mythological
drumbeat, groundless vibrations,
mounting birthless, made from dark matter,
living only to the taste,
dust on the wordless tongue,
a silence, encased in an echo
never bound,
we, fortunate,
binge on the profound.

- excerpt from "internet current"

Cyclical Resolution, "Wordplay" PDF Online!

Cyclical Wordplay

Hello to All Fellow Dreamers, Bloggers and Visitors:

As you may have noticed, I have been posting excerpts from the "Cyclical Wordplay" collection (linked to the first artwork under Experimental Writing Gallery to the right) for the past few weeks as an addendum to each post.

As I move onto my "Exotic Settlers" collection to accompany the next generation of dream posts, I am making a PDF version of the entire Cyclical Wordplay collection available for your creative reading / interpretive pleasures.

This is all for the centred purpose of crafting and developing my creative writing in concert with the online community. It is a great dream of mine to share, collaborate and continue to explore each other's inner and outer worlds through web-based creativity. Viva La Tecnologia De Los Pueblos! Long Live the Technology of the People!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD CYCLICAL WORDPLAY

Reception to date for "Cyclical Wordplay"

Writings

- Publications -

ditch, poetry that matters

- Forthcoming -

3:AM Magazine, Eskimo Pie

Art

- Exhibitions -

The New Post Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing

Maad Sheep

- Forthcoming -

Best Fiction

Responding to the Critical Condition of Earth

Chapter 1

“An American oil baron eventually answered the call, building an open-pit mine with an upgrader in the 1960s. He used technology largely funded by Canadian taxpayers. Although the mine lost money for decades, it kept the dream alive.”

Chapter 2

“But neither the Alberta nor the Canadian government has done a thorough energy accounting yet.”

From: Tar Sands by Andrew Nikiforuk

A Response:

Canada is attempting to raise itself up on the shoulders of an entire world dependent on cheap oil resources, in the name of profit and political standing, Canada is dragging this world deeper into environmental degradation and addiction to fossil fuel-dependent, unsustainable life.

As people of this age, whether in Canada or not, we must all move in the direction of re-building our society, to live on this Earth, as focused on what is both local and sustainable as possible, in order to revise our habits of depending on food sources cultivated by the world's poorest, on clothing made by the world's most destitute and on materials and energy for our way of life which depend on the degradation of our environment and the destruction of small-scale and remote human communities. Our housing and transportation technologies are leading us towards inevitable destruction, displacement and complete abandonment of the human community. Why have we chosen to neglect our future generations and remain ignorant about the creative solutions that we know we can achieve to change all of this in our own lives?