Yestermorrow Design/Build School

This is really cool, at least to me...I found a link to this place called the Yestermorrow Design/Build School while snooping on Idealist this morning. What they're up to is really interesting. They're all about facilitating community through the built environment, which is a concept that has fascinated me (with growing interest) for the last 2 years.

Here are some courses offered: http://www.yestermorrow.org/courses.htm. I find the "Whole Buildings and Communities" section especially interesting. If I had the money, and lived in Vermont, I would totally take one of these classes.

And their mission statement: Yestermorrow Design/Build School inspires people to create a better, more sustainable world by providing hands-on education that integrates design and craft as a creative, interactive process.

If this stuff interests you, you may also like the following book: Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. Looking through this book was an instrumental part of my senior year of college as I worked on projects considering innovative ways to improve communities. Then, this past summer I became friends with two Systems Engineering majors from UVA, who further catapulted this interest. By the way I had a class on systems theory in college-a class that was supposed to be an anthropology course but ended up focusing on the way systems theory impacts societies at large. As I built my final paper, I focused on the concept that a "controller" of the system is necessary to keep the system running (in talking about the world as a system, the solar system as a system, etc). If a system exists, then necessarily there is a creator/starter/functioner of that system. If, as anthropologist Gregory Bateson says "We are never outside of the ecology for which we plan, [and are] always and inevitably a part of it," then something is working outside of us. Anyway...Are we starting to see a common thread running through some of these experiences? I am.

Meanwhile, a few asides later, and some interesting stuff to chew on for some of you. Maybe others are yawning by now... I'm about to pick up the book 3 Cups of Tea over a cup of tea, recommended by my friend Ryan, one of the systems engineers. We'll see where that trek leads next.