Last week I announced Emily Wang’s Own Workshop on Sustainable Building 9/14. Today I attended it and learned more than I expected to, which happens when you get your hands dirty from digging into clay.

Here’s Emily in the structure we helped build, a chicken coop at none other than Drew Gardens, where I hold my twice-annual cooking workshops in the Bronx. If you read Emily’s blog, which I recommend, you’ll see she refers to me sometimes, including her taking my sustainability leadership workshop learning the Spodek Method. She’s in the video on this page describing her experience in the workshop.

You might guess I connected them. You’d be right. It happened after Emily started taking natural building workshops and asked if anyone in the sustainability leadership workshop alumni community needed structures built that she could build. The Drew Gardens community needed a coop for their chickens and they collaborated to go beyond just building and host the workshop.

I heard of natural building from Emily and another workshop graduate, but had never held cob in my hand or seen a structure being built. Now I have. I see its value and more problems with currently conventional building.

I recommend learning about natural building, ideally participating in building a structure.

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I can’t help commenting on how I got there. I was going to take the train up with my bike, then ride home. My Metrocard didn’t work. It turns out it had $2.80 on it. A fare is $2.90. Neither Metrocard vending machines at the entrance too credit cards so I couldn’t add more money. I could have gone to a different entrance and used a credit card or even gone back home for a dime. Instead, I decided to ride my bike the ten or so miles there without a map. It felt more bold to ride ten miles instead of walking a across the street to a different entrance.

Since I rode up, knew I would ride back, today was a gross day in my exercise cycle so I did Turkish get-ups, kettle bell swings, and farmers walks, and knew tomorrow I’d be on my feet all day, so I only minimally participated in the building part, but got my hands dirty and helped build a chicken coop that will last decades that I’ll be able to see and know I helped build every time I see it.

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Here was the announcement:

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