Workshop / Experts of practice | Down to Earth
Gut leben auf kleinem Fuß – Earthships, ökologisch bauen und der Traum von der Autarkie
Henry Farkas, Johannes Comeau Milke
Imagine a house that heats and cools itself, provides you with food and drinking water, purifies your waste water and produces electricity. Imagine building this house together with people from your community, using raw materials from closed circuits. Finally, imagine living in this house, entirely independent of large, centralised supply structures and surrounded by nature. The dream of the energy-plus-house (low cost, DIY, cradle to cradle): why we dream it and how we can live it.
The workshop participants will be taken on a journey into the world of sustainable building, learning and living. Using images and personal stories they will be immersed in a real utopia and together they will create designs for ecological and sustainable building projects.
After graduating from the Earthship Academy in the USA in 2013, Henry Farkas founded the Earthship Germany Network together with two friends and began to organise workshops and seminars on self-sufficient earth mound housing. The network’s activities culminated in the construction of the first approved earthship in Germany in 2015 at the community village Schloss Tempelhof in Baden-Württemberg. This was followed by the foundation of the creative and collaborative experimental space “Wir bauen Zukunft” and the agency ‘down2earth’. Under the umbrella of “down2earth”, Farkas has organised seminars at the TU Berlin together with his colleague Lale Rohrbeck on tiny houses. Farkas has also been involved in constructing Superadobe domes and has designed a number of wooden structures including pavilions, playgrounds, stockades and geodesic domes.
Johannes Comeau Milke is a future scout, entrepreneur and certified permaculture designer. He accompanies innovation projects with workshops and lectures on agile principles and design thinking and helps to develop meaningful products, services and experiences. Milke experiments with resilient systems, earthships and tiny houses, biomimicry, permaculture as well as new organisation models and founded the consultancy “J2C – Journey 2 Creation” and the cooperative “Wir bauen Zukunft”, on whose premises he is leading the development of a forest garden.