Microhouse Build in Belize

In February 2020, Vince Horn will be traveling to Belize to help build a Microhouse from compressed earth bricks (CEBs). He'll bring the learning from that experience back to the Buddhist Geeks Farm.

In order to realize the radical vision of the Buddhist Geeks Farm we believe that it's essential to practice demonitization, so that we can subtract ourselves from current socioeconomic systems enough so that we might "build up parallel, temporary utopias, whose objectives with time are made permanent" (Bard & Soderqvist).

One of the biggest areas of expense, for a project like this, are land & building costs. We are currently working to raise funds to purchase land outright, but once we have the land we still need to be able to build cost effective & ecologically regenerative housing. One of our key partners, in this regard, is the Open Source Ecology team, who are working on creating a Global Village Construction Kit:

"The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. We’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made at a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free."

They are already over 1/3rd of the way complete with the development of these 50 open source industrial machines--which includes a 3D Printer, Power Cube, Tractor, and a Compressed Earth Brick Press aptly named: The Liberator. The Liberator takes local soil and converts it into extremely durable and ecologically sound earth bricks, which can then be used to build out the core infrastructure of the Buddhist Geeks Farm.

Microhouse Build in Belize

So that we can better understand the potential for us to create our own open source brick press, and use to it build a variety of affordable structures--from houses, to barns, to dorms and beyond--in February 2020, Vincent Horn will be attending a 5-day Compressed Earth Brick Microhouse Build in Belize. Vincent has minimal building experience, so we think this will be a good test in seeing how their extreme manufacturing methods work, and whether or not they're effective, even with unskilled labor.

The other purpose of this trip is to form human relationships with the Open Source Ecology team, so that we might continue to partner with them on their world-transforming vision. In order for projects like ours to happen, we need the tools & hardware that can build actual structures which house actual people & things. We want to help this open source hardware movement flourish so that everyone of us can flourish (aka enlightened self interest).