Making Beauty
Happen.
Together.

It glows! The other day I checked in on our bottle build in Besao. It’s looking good and getting higher! The wall is built with clear wine bottles and in the center, three rows of water/food color filled gin bottles for a little artistic touch. Next, a good smooth finishing. The best thing about this…

  Walking through the Bontoc Capitol Park yesterday, I came across half a dozen teenagers playing on our giant snake– the one that we made from ecobricks last month.   It was so awesome to see them having fun on it.   The kids had devised some sort of tag and were scurrying madly too and fro…

What to do with toxic hospital trash?  No really, what to do?!  I was asked this question two months ago, now I am in the village of Besao trying out some solutions.  Here in Besao, surely like so many other places in the world, hospitals generate all sorts of crazy wastes.  Its one element of…

I am feeling excited and grateful for an amazing window of opportunity.  I am working on a simple document, that I feel will have a dramatic effect on Mt. Province, here where I live in the Philippines.  The doc is being developed with my friends in the department of Education who have been involved in…

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…