Full-scale natural building
The construction track ends with you leading the design and build of a complete natural structure: an earthship, a cob home, a timber frame. But phase 3 has a second job that matters just as much: building builders. Training people as you go, running workshops, and setting up material pipelines so the second building on the site costs half the sweat of the first.
Start here
Michael Reynolds walks through the design he's refined for fifty years: tire walls, passive solar, integrated water and food systems.
Earthship Biotecture — The Refuge is the economy model, the simplest and cheapest earthship to build. Worth studying as a realistic first community build.
Square rule layout, the system that lets multiple people cut interchangeable joints on the same frame. That property is exactly what makes community timber framing work.
First project
Design and lead a complete natural building
Design a natural building appropriate for your site and climate. Organize and lead the build, training community members as you go. Document everything: drawings, material quantities, labor hours, what went wrong and how you fixed it. The documentation is half the project. It's what turns one building into a building program.
Other ways in
Auxiliary structure first
Design and build a small auxiliary building before tackling a residence: a sauna, root cellar, sleeping cabin, workshop, or outdoor kitchen. Same systems (foundation, walls, roof, finish), much lower stakes, and a complete feedback loop on materials, labor budget, and crew dynamics. Most community-scale construction failures come from skipping this step.
Season as labor on someone else's build
Spend a season as labor on an active natural-build project before leading your own. The construction equivalent of the farm apprenticeship. You will see the realities a workshop omits: the bad weather days, the material delays, the joinery that did not work, the crew dynamics under fatigue. The unknown-unknowns get resolved on someone else's dollar.
Go deeper
Community Experiences
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