housing

Anita Otilia Rodriguez * Amazing Artist * Adobe Contractor * Community Leader

My daughter, Shemai, and I have been on perhaps a thousand construction sites between us as professional contractors. Back in those days two beautiful women in coveralls, tape on hips, knee pads and sassy attitudes was way against the rules in a super-macho trade. Simply to make a living in an extremely competitive business we learned to “read” construction sites with psychic accuracy.

Working with this crew was a first for both of us.

We are more than impressed, we are honored to know Vets Off Grid and the volunteers who supported their leadership. Vets off Grid are deep, beautiful, humble, authentic, thoughtful, highly skilled people. I VOTE THEM THE BEST NON-PROFIT IN TAOS, and if I were not 83 none of them would be safe.

What they did was like a choreographed homage to team work, to community in action – making art, sanctifying the revolutionary and primordial process of building together. A dance, a prayer.
Watching them I realized that the present construction industry conquered and colonized the natural, organic RIGHT to build as a united community. We have been robbed of the natural process of creating architecture according to one’s culture, ecosystem, and locally available materials.


Like the deadly touch of Midas, the profit motive permeates our entire system, and vernacular building (building by the people, for the people) has become a for-profit industry that is responsible for 37% of global pollution, and holds us hostage as captive consumers.


Everyone in this group picture understands that building together is a deeply revolutionary act of spiritual de-colonization on the most practical and essential of levels. More than a right – building together is part of surviving in the biosphere – even oysters, bees, bears and moles have housing!


But there is more, a backstory behind this work of art still in process. I am the alleged leader, it was my idea. On June 25 I got up to pee, passed out and woke up in a puddle of blood. ER, then 10 days in intensive care at Holy Cross, then to Odelia re-hab in Burque, while the foundations, Hyper-adobe and counter pouring are going on at the STAKEOUT, I have been moved to 8 beds in less than a month.
From the frying pan to the fire and back to the pan, 8 times, from one hospital unit to another, never, ever coming home to roost with what I longed for more than anything else – peace and quiet in my own space.

After the accident, family and friends undertook to remodel my house, replace the beautiful sunken tub with a safer shower, put in ramps, and is still in process. The pinche insurance company kicked me out of Odelia for being too healthy but before the remodeling is finished! Thanks too for the titanic efforts of my son-in-law from heaven, John Fernandez. It has taken a team of about 7 family and friends to keep me alive, organized by my daughter who is ALSO running the CASA construction site, AND taking care of me – 24/7.

https://www.veteransoffgrid.org – Veterans Off-grid

https://www.facebook.com/VeteransOffgrid.org

Sixth Sequence — Rainy Discussions

Adobe Construction with Hassan Fathy (1900-1989) was a famous and pioneering Egyptian architect renowned for his commitment to sustainable and culturally sensitive architecture. His work focused on using traditional building techniques and local materials to create affordable housing, particularly for the poor in rural areas.

Bill White – Anita O. Rodriguez – Taos New Mexico

Survey: Growing number of Hawaii residents feel state moving in wrong direction

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – A new survey shows an increasing number of Hawaii residents feel the state is moving in the wrong direction.

The Pacific Resource Partnership launched its first Hawaii Perspectives report back in 2019 with 45% of respondents saying the state is on the wrong track.

Five years later, more than half of respondents now share that feeling.

“It’s really frightening at least for me personally having a young family and knowing that my daughter growing up will face very similar issues that we see captured in the research,” said PRP interim executive director Josh Magno.

“For the organization and for myself, it’s really trying to work with other partners in the community to really find positive solutions.”

The major issues driving that negative feeling are familiar ones with 75% of respondents citing affordable housing, cost of living, and homelessness as their key concerns.

(https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/02/20/new-survey-shows-increasing-number-hawaii-residents-feel-state-is-moving-wrong-direction/)

A Traditional Future

Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari uses local building techniques to rebuild villages in the flood-stricken Sindh region.

Yasmeen Lari - Architect

Yasmeen Lari is Pakistan’s first female architect and one of the most successful providers of disaster relief shelters in the world. She has built over 36,000 houses for victims of floods and earthquakes in Pakistan since 2010.

Shunning the structurally weak, mass-produced houses offered by international organisations, Lari uses vernacular techniques and local materials such as lime and bamboo. Her houses have a tiny carbon footprint and are simple enough for people to build themselves. With this, she hopes to demonstrate the role that architecture can play in humanitarian aid.

“I often tell my colleagues, let us not treat disaster-affected households as destitute, needing handouts … but with dignity,” she says.

Lari once built giant concrete and steel buildings for clients like the Pakistani State Oil company. But when disaster struck in 2005, she turned to traditional techniques to design flood and earthquake proof buildings for people in remote regions.

She returns to the Sindh region to see how her homes survived the 2013 floods and helps villagers in Awaran after the 2013 Balochistan earthquake.

Filmmaker’s view

By Faiza Ahmad Khan

Just a week before I left for Pakistan to film this documentary, the chief minister of my home state Rajasthan in India (which, incidentally, borders Sindh, the part of Pakistan that I was about to visit), pledged that within the next two years, there would be not a single mud house left standing in the state.

For many years the central government in India has already had a programme in place, which gives those in rural areas a sum of money to replace their traditional mud houses with brick and cement structures. Traditional is seen as poor and inferior and the fast track to “development” cannot, God forbid, be lined with mud and thatch houses.

While filming in Pakistan, I shared our chief minister’s announcement with an artisan who works with Yasmeen Lari at the Heritage Foundation in a village called Moak Sharif in Sindh.

“Thank God we’re decades behind India in this development business,” he said.

On one of my travels in Orissa in India, to a village called Govindpur that is resisting land acquisition for the mega steel company, POSCO, I met a woman who was rebuilding her kachcha house (made of natural materials, such as mud, bamboo and leave) despite being able to access government funding for a concrete house.

“We depend on this land for everything, we take what we know can be replenished. People in cities have no connection with the land so they don’t think twice about cutting down trees, mining the earth hollow. You think you’re separate from nature but you’re not. If this goes, you go,” she said.

What I am constantly being reminded of, as this country builds the capitalist dream, is that we stand to lose the wealth of traditional knowledge that pivots around this belief – ways to farm, heal, learn and live.

At the Heritage Foundation centre in Moak Sharif, Yasmeen Lari has been working to preserve traditional ways of building. The centre was set up by Yasmeen and her team in 2005 and has evolved to include a women’s centre, a small learning centre for children and a clinic to provide health care for the residents of the village.

Yasmeen believes that her role as an architect should not be restricted to designing houses and buildings. Instead, things should grow in an integrated way.

While I was there, they managed to get the government school, once barely functioning, in working order. Women from the village had organised themselves into a ‘mothers committee’ to oversee the school’s daily operations. And after I returned to India, every once in a while, Yasmeen would call and explain, with great delight, something new they were experimenting with – organic farming, bio fertilizers and natural soaps.

Through the making of this film I realised that building the “earth-way” means fluidity, not concreteness. It means working with the community, integrating it with structures of support and togetherness. Building homes, for Yasmeen, is about situating them. She guides her team to create this kind of space. Traditional, yes, but by no means can this approach be deemed irrelevant. More