Music and Mud at Bonnaroo

Former Yestermorrow Design/Build School interns Amorin Mello and Anne Marie Flusche are heading up a team to build a strawbale post office on the 700 acre Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival site in Manchester, Tennessee (http://www.bonnaroo.com/). They still need a few folks with natural building skills to help so if you are interested in a muddy and musical experience visit their FaceBook page (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=13181314573&ref=mf) to get details on what you can expect from the experience. But act fast because mudslingers have to be on site by the 6th of June.

And if you do go you might see many Yestermorrowians in the crowd because the Mad River CarbonShredders might be making an appearence, Buzz Ferver (board member and instuctor) will be helping with the compost operation on site, and Russ Bennett (instructor) is one of the moving forces behind the event.

Summer 2008 interns are on their way...

We are getting ready for the summer season at Yestermorrow and looking forward to the arrival of our summer session interns-- Erin Campbell, Colin Widdoes, Laura Fedderson, Matt Wolpe and Bob O'Hara. They're all making their way towards Vermont and will be arriving this coming weekend. Erin's already been posting on her blog about Yestermorrow and why she's coming here as an intern. Check it out at:
http://auntiebooger.blogspot.com/2008/05/yestermorrow-groovy-place-to-be.html

Yestermorrow named to Metropolitan Home magazine's Design 100

If you're familiar with Yestermorrow, you know that Yestermorrow is unique. Indeed, one in a million.

Now Yestermorrow is being honored for it's one-of-a-kind-ness. Yestermorrow has been chosen by the editorial staff at Metropolitan Home magazine as 1 of the 100 best and most interesting designers, design elements or locations of the past year. Published annually, the Metropolitan Home's Design 100 list is an “admittedly quixotic collage of the 100 most noteworthy objects, events and personalities in the world of design.”

Join us for a special reception in New York City to celebrate this award and the many achievements of our special design/build school. Our "1 in 100 Reception" takes place May 19 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm at the Gallery at Tribeca Cinemas. You can find more information here.

Big Ideas about Small Spaces, by Andreas Stavropoulos

I am pleased to introduce a new course for Yestermorrow Design/Build School. Designing Small Living Spaces is a course that has been years in the making.

The origin of the course lies in the frustration of bigness. Bigness, to borrow the term from Rem Koolhaus, permeates all aspects of American culture. Bigness of portions, bigness of vehicles, and bigness in homes are just a few, and they are leading to bigness of problems. Sadly, bigness begets bigness, and, until now, there were few constraints of just how big that bigness could get. In the last 50 years our culture has been flooded with propaganda equating size with quality, explicitly encouraged by big business and tacitly condoned by the government.

However, of late, there have been many big signs that all is not well in our culture of bigness. The recent big drop in the stock market, as well as the big credit crunch, have given us big cause for concern. Big increases in oil prices and food prices may cause big changes in the way that we fuel ourselves and our transportation. At the same time that we are painfully discovering these limits to bigness, there are a number of rapidly growing small movements afoot. A doubling in the number of farmer's markets over the past 5 years is a big step in the direction of smallness. Big advances in wind power technology and solar are allowing more power to be produced on a local scale.

So when I proposed a class to teach some big ideas about smallness, Yestermorrow was enthusiastic, of course, in a big way.

Designing Small Living Spaces is offered as a week-long course at Yestermorrow as way to demonstrate that quality design can allow us to design, build and get big rewards out of small spaces. In the course, we will look at domestic and international examples of how cultures and individuals have designed small dwellings. Some of the dwellings are iconoclastic while others are miniaturized versions of the white picket fence concept. We'll look at students' individual situations, and generate big ideas on how to solve them. We'll generate small sparks of genius and deliver big doses of encouragement as students work together to apply big ideas to small spaces.

(Andreas X. Stavropoulos is an airstream-dweller, cargo trailer remodeler, tipi aficionado who works by day as a landscape architect to combat bigness by designing small spaces for people in Berkeley, CA)

Yestermorrow Instructor Featured at Longwood Gardens

If life is driving you up a tree this spring, you might take a trip to Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania (visit http://www.longwoodgardens.org/NaturesCastles.html) and check out their treehouse exhibition--three very cool arbor abodes. If you like what you see and want to build one of your own, there is no better place to come than Yestermorrow. In fact, one of the lead builders of the Longwood structures is our very own Eyrich Stauffer. And he and Erik Hegre will teaching a class in Sustainable Treehouse Design and Construction on May 4-11th.

Other Yestermorrowians working on this project include:

Ben Cheney (YM instructor and former intern 2003)
Jay Tarlecki (intern 2006)
Christian Peterson (intern 2005)
Eric Stevens (alumnus)
Dan Wheeler (intern 2007)
Josh Jackson (instructor)
Skip Dewhirst (instructor)

Congratulations to all of you on job well done!

Bob Ferris

Instructor Ben Falk Featured on FastCompany.com

Yestermorrow instructor Ben Falk was recently profiled on www.FastCompany.com along with his business Whole Systems Design of Moretown, VT. Falk teaches a variety of courses at Yestermorrow, including Design for Climate Change and Biofuels. Read the full article here. Congratulations Ben!

Let's Face It!

With social networking being all the rage, how could Yestermorrow be left behind? The answer to that question is: We just won't. So now in among the sundry alumni pages featured on Facebook you will now find a Yestermorrow page too. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=14368031554&ref=mf

Visit the page. Sign up and start communicating with your fellow Yestermorrowites (Yestermorrowians?).

Enjoy,

Bob Ferris

Yestermorrow Seeks Campus Master Planning Intern

We have a special opportunity which has recently come to our attention. As you may have heard, we are embarking on the first phase of our expansion plan to build a new shop in the spring of 2009. We have just sent out an RFP to recruit an integrated design/build firm to lead this process. Plus we are still continuing to refine our campus master plan which the folks from the Conway School of Landscape Design helped us with last year.

We are looking for a special Yestermorrow intern to work under the direction of the Building and Grounds committee to help prepare site plans, document our existing conditions, and help with the permitting and planning process. This could count for IDP credits (for architecture students). Ideally we’d like to find someone who can commit to 20 hours/week for 4 months, but could also work with someone for a shorter time period more intensively if it worked better for their schedule. We don't have lodging available on campus but could offer a camping spot or help you find a place in town.
We are still working out some of the details, but if you're interested in learning more about this new opportunity, please email kate@yestermorrow.org.

Here’s the scope of the project as we have defined it so far:
1) Creating a unified format set of plans of the various master plans and visions over the past 10 years.
2) Gathering all current base information, and putting it in uniform format- Survey and topo info, ANR GIS info, soils, hydrology, vegetation. Updating more detailed mapping of the "campground" and other misc structures and gardens, trails, etc. Updated plans of the chalet existing conditions. Updated plans of the school building existing conditions. All official permit plans and Act 250 submission, wastewater and water permitting information, etc.
3) Developing massing, grading, and site layout for the school zone master plan. Developing utilities infrastructure plan for the campus. Develop a base "permaculture plan" for the central green and school zone areas, including locating existing trees and making a plan as to which stay and which go.
4) Develop a soft costs budget, to further planning, engineering, and permitting that will be necessary to make progress with plans.
5) Develop models, plans, CAD models, etc that will be useful in fundraising efforts.
The Campus Master Planning intern will work under the guidance of the Buildings and Grounds committee (which meets approximately bi-weekly) and document the process of the committee.