Making Beauty
Happen.
Together.

I am really digging working with clay and bottles.  Here is a sitting area that accopanies that gin bottle wall I posted earlier.  The bench is made from eco-bricks, alas, it wasnt so comfortable.  So I thought, why not sculpt a comfortable chair onto it?! The clay/sand/straw mix we are working with becomes super strong…

We are building a wall made of luniscent gin bottles today in the village of Besao!  The prototype wall is an experiment and showcase in upcycling bottles and building from local materials.  The bottles are filled with food coloring and mortared with cob (local clay, sand and rice straw and a little cement powder).  Compared…

I was flipping through papers at the local newstand the other day when I had a shock:  There was our project on the front page!  The article sprouts from an eco-conference that Sarah and Pi led in Bontoc.  The process of reflecting on the story behind the trash problem in Bontoc, brought out all sorts…

I noticed something strange in the way people speak in the indegenuous Igorot villages here where I live. When the people speak in English they call wrappers and plastics that are on the ground “dirts”.  This is strange– I figured it must be obviously a translation from their local dialect. Stranger, in the larger towns and…

This is the second short documentary on our work in Guina’ang and the bottle brick phenomenon that has been spreading throughout mountain province as a way to deal with the trash. Illac and Alex, two guys from the Manila chapter of Architecture for Humanity, braved the rough roads to make the 14 hour journey to…

I live in one of the poorest parts of the world.  It is beset by the “problems” of poverty, overpopulation, corporate exploitation and pollution.  The circumstances here are the same for the majority of people on the planet– be they in Africa, South America or one of the many urban slums on the planet. As…

We are now at version 0.9 of the Uninhibited Solar Charger.  I am now working with a select group of talented guys in Bontoc, on readying the design for community manufacture.  In the Philippines, there are all these little stores where you can get your cellphones and computers fixed.  The guys behind the counter are…

What is Garbology exactly? Well, my friend Joel and I came up with the term for the title of a lecture at Xijen College, where he is president. It was just for fun at first, but now the term seems to have stuck. Pi, our intrepid film maker friend put together this little documentary on…

    Dozens and dozens of parents joined us to lay the leveling foundation for the inspiration center on Friday.  It was truly an amazing event of mandalic collaboration– the whole village coming together to help make something happen.  In this case, we were laying the first terrace of the site for the Inspiration Center…

“We envision building inspiration centers with schools throughout the Cordilleras to empower the upcoming generations to meet the challenges of our times.  Inspiration Centers will be open spaces that allow the youth to cultivate creativity, self-learning, and planet-consciousness through multi-media, meetings, movies and more.  Each center will be constructed out of local trash, earth, organic resources and…