Hello, my name is Gonzalo and I’m from Chile.  I had the most amazing experience of my life a couple of months ago in Taos, NM learning how to build Earthships…  For the first time in my life I didn’t feel alone.
 
16 years ago, when I just a kid, my dad took me with him and a couple of his friends to build “mediaguas” (3x6 meters-big emergency social homes), for poor people who live nearby Santiago.  That was the first time I affronted the housing problem in Chile… I couldn’t stop crying when I would pray at night remembering how thankful these people were for their new home and remembering the exact words my father said to them when we gave them the house: “sorry for the little, but we don’t have anymore to give, for now.”

The expectations I brought with me to Earthship Biotecture were that I would walk away with experiences, skills, new friends, and knew that I would have no idea as to how this journey would affect my life. My goal was to set out to do the best I could, and to see what nourishes me.

After taking my presentation around Australia in the past few weeks I've definitely gotten a little soppy and homesick for my new 'other' home.  It's hard to describe how such a seemingly harsh, desolate and isolated place can really capture one's heart and mind.  And I've travelled alot, I have an abundance of special places locked away in my mind's eye, (hotsprings in Turkey, an Ashram in Israel, a particular Jamaican pub in Brighton, UK).. but Taos has managed to cement a strong hold in my heart for its genuine strength of conviction, community and incredible landscape which really make you stop and take a beath and appreciate its unique beauty, especially how lucky we were to have such a backdrop as a distraction from the ever-so-hard work of digging enormous ditches, mixing cement, polishing glasses and sitting back next to the fire after work.

So I thought I'd put up a bit of a retrospective of my favourite photos from Taos, the amazing people I met and the great time we shared in our first journey to the high mountains of New Mexico but hopefully not the last.  A cheers goes out to my fellow Academy people, we came, we dug, we mixed and we laughed.

Earthship Biotecture Academy, 2011 - Part 2 -

When you look at the course structure of the Biotecture Academy, it's hard to image how they're meant to cover all the formal learning and practical application aspects of Biotecture in such a short time. 

When I left Australia I had very few expectations of the first academy other than wanting to engage with the organisation; find out who the crew was, learn from them, watch them at work, hear stories about what works what doesn't, see the Greater World for myself, get up to R.E.A.C.H and mostly see how capable I was at learning from scratch many skills necessary for building my own home one day and helping others fulfil their dream too.

If I look back on the formal and practical learning modules of the academy I'm quite amazed at what we covered.  Aside from a classroom based approach to learning the basic philosophies, budgeting and planning, systems, materials lists, global applications, architectural history, and how to go out and embark upon projects of our own, we were given access to a range of jobs and skills I'd never been able to try out before.