At Morning Meeting today it was a bit windy and we held the meeting in the Lab Building to keep warm. Actually the temps are pretty mild for the year but the wind is so gusty that it seems much colder than it really is.

We are starting out the Colly Soleri Music Center concert season with a bang.

This weekend we have the film shoot for the indie movie Carried Away.

Then on Mar 14th Theoretical Isolation: A Post-atomic Experiment will be performed at The Center by Ira Murfin, an alum of Arcosanti. He is organizing this event which includes some performers from his Chicago based theater act. While he is here he’ll be offering a acting workshop on the Tuesday before the performance.

In the Afternoon, the construction team had a chance to go over some of the plans and ideas revolving around LaLoggia and accompanying Arcosanti Greenhouse complex and discuss these with the Feb Workshop.

The idea is to develop an integrated greenhouse farming system that both produces food and also energy for the buildings up above (The greenhouse is part of the Energy Apron).

During the afternoon I also had the chance to tell the story of how I met my friend and colleague Joy Tang after leaving Arcosanti in 03 and going to the Planetwork Conference at the Presidio in SF. Since working together in oneVillage we have seen our work as the evolution of that being done in various ecovillages and similar socially and ecologically conscious projects around the world.  A key aspect of our work is identifying the role of Information Technologies in providing assistance to communities to become more sustainable. Also related to that is the development of strong cultural identities in these communities. So one aspect of our work has been to promote cultural exchanges between societies.

During the presentation I talked about how Joy has been in Taiwan working to raise awareness of the value of African indigenous culture in the context of Taiwan’s own indigenous tribes. This has materialized in the group Unity Drum which is a fusion of African and Taiwanese indigenous music and dancing. Most recently the group performed for the well known Japanese fashion designer  Issey Miyake at his Fashion Show in Taipie on Mar 5.

Leon Neihouse has been putting forward some important links in relation to integrated design, habitat construction and food production.

His work is most relevant to the effort to develop the Energy Apron + Greenhouse that is envisioned to provide much of the food for Arcosanti Critical Mass (this idea of the project gaining momentum to do larger scale development as envisioned by Paolo Soleri in terms of actually creating a fully operational Arcology).

The core question for consideration here is: how one might consider the development of an Arcology type vision of urban living that would include the habitat getting a significant amount of its food onsite using state of the art food production technologies.

Leon recently submitted an application to the Bucky Fuller Institute (the BFI Challenge) with an idea to develop an vertical farm prototype in Maine that would provide an integrated live and work environment that could be a showcase for sustainability in the 21st century.

He has been working with Open Source pioneer Eric Hunting. Eric wrote a rather long article entitled “Adaptive Architecture, Collaborative Design, and the Evolution of Community” for the Peer to Peer Foundation (P2P) website. Eric and Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation have agreed to work with Leon to reprint an abridged version in the book he is drafting.

Leon also has been working with Dr. Despommier the originator or the Vertical Farm concept (which was featured in an article in the Dec issue of Time) and Dr. Schreibman who is an expert on aquaponics.

The recent Dec 6 panel discussion on the Lean Linear City at the Phoenix Central Library featured a design for a large scale food production system located inside the Arcology complex. As such designs are considered in the development of an Arcology, it becomes increasingly important to consider what people like Dr Despommier are actually designing in the field of intensive urban food production systems and in terms of what people Barry Adler of Rainfresh Harvests are actually doing to test out such systems at a small scale.

He also reports that Dr. Brin, a Science Fiction author, has expressed some interest and they are investigating collaboration through Dr Brin’s EON foundation.