City Repair Founder Mark Lakeman to Speak at Yestermorrow

Visionary architect, permaculturist, and community-renewal advocate Mark Lakeman will present a public lecture at Yestermorrow on Tuesday, March 25. Lakeman is the principal of the community architecture and planning firm Communitecture, Inc., as well as the co-founder of the Portland, Oregon-based non-profit place-making organization City Repair Project, and its affiliate programs, The Village Building Convergence and the Planet Repair Institute.

Lakeman’s presentation, entitled “City Repair & Planet Repair: Transforming Space into Place,” will describe a chronological set of strategies and creative interventions that are being used to retrofit American communities and cities. Beginning with the gathering places and cultural dynamic that are characteristically weak or absent in many communities, the models and strategies he will present have been shown to replicate and spread to neighborhoods across the continent, taking on new forms that compound their impact and begin to transform political leadership and bureaucratic cultures, town by town and city by city.

With an exhaustive list of socially and ecologically innovative projects under his belt -- including numerous ecovillage designs, infill co-housing examples, projects involving low income and homeless people, and an assortment of culturally restorative initiatives driven by the patterns of broad participation, local ownership, and social capital – Lakeman’s dedicated focus on the nexus of sustainable landscapes and cultural solutions has won him admirers worldwide.

His projects have been featured in Dwell Magazine, Architecture Magazine, New Village Journal, Yes Magazine, the Utne Reader, and many others. He was awarded the National Lewis Mumford Award by the international organization Architects & Planners for Social Responsibility for his work with Dignity Village, one of the United States’ first self-developed, permanent communities by and for previously homeless people.

Lakeman’s lecture will begin at 7pm at the Yestermorrow campus on Route 100 in Waitsfield. It is free and open to the general public.

Adam Riggin Lovin' Learnin' With His Hands In Woodworking Certificate

'Socks' dress up a table leg.

Walking through the wood shop during Week 5 of the Woodworking Certificate program, there is a palpable excitement as the students focus on assembling the components of their traditional shaker-style end tables. This is the moment where every joint they’ve learned to this point will come together in a single piece of furniture. Though the tables emanate from the same design, everyone has pursued their own aesthetic touches. The table sitting in front of me is strikingly different, with ‘socks’ at the base of each leg, and through-mortises— a more modern aesthetic on a traditional piece. In the back of the shop, Adam Riggin, who is the youngest of the group, is busy sanding his end pieces.

Adam has come to the program after finishing his third semester at UVM, where he is studying Community Development & Economics. When asked about taking time off, Adam smiles and explains, “Time off? That’s framing it as if school was the thing to do and everything else was a deviation from that.  School is always going to be there. I love school, but I am interested in other things as well. James Michener has a book called The Drifters, and there’s a guy in it who says that you don’t waste a day in your life before you are thirty-five – the idea being that every experience shapes you as a person and [helps you] get some insight.”

 

Adam explains that his program at UVM is very theoretical and he found himself longing for something more hands-on. Hailing from East Montpelier, Adam had grown up knowing about Yestermorrow.  His boss during his summer work doing construction was even a Yestermorrow instructor. It was during a conversation with his father last summer that he decided to take a break from college and enroll in the Woodworking Certificate program.

“I spent a couple summers building and that was really fun, but it’s hard to be working and learning at the same time for me because when you’re getting paid to do something, there’s pressure to not make mistakes or to fix things as fast as possible. Being in an educational setting just allows you to, for one thing, take your time, and also, not be afraid to make mistakes and to ask as many questions as you want and get lengthy explanations. It’s a really supportive environment and you couldn’t ask for a better group of people.”

He looks at the end pieces for his shaker table before him and speaks of how satisfying it was to prepare the

wood and get it to its current state. “The assembly has been a challenge for me because I made a couple of mistakes in my layout, so hopefully I will have this all glued-up and ready to install the drawers by the end of the day.”

So what’s next for Adam? He is in no hurry to get back to school. He will be taking another semester off to tour the East Coast and Europe with Village Harmony, a renowned Vermont-based group that teaches world folk music. Peering into the shop later in the day, Adam is smiling at the table before him, now glued and clamped. “This work is so satisfying,” he beams.

By Nic Tuff

Woodworking Student Drew Chambers Goes with the Grain

Sitting down in the Yestermorrow South Studio to design a very elaborate pencil box, Woodworking Certificate student Drew Chambers reflects on the program, now in its fourth week.  “Wood is something we all know with our eyes closed. But understanding how it grows, how it’s milled, and how it wants to behave are all integral to making wooden objects that will last.” 

In these preliminary weeks of the eleven-week program, the class has already gone into the forest to analyze trees and the wood they produce, and studied the process of felling and skidding trees, and milling it into lumber.  In the shop, green logs have been turned into ladderback chairs, and students have been introduced to the technical details of cabinetry and the art of joinery. Some students came into the program with significant experience, while others did not, yet every one of the chairs they produced looks uniformly elegant and reminiscent of one you might find in a refined antique shop. They have even built beautiful wooden mallets which they will take with them as they embark on their woodworking careers. And this week, a diverse range of boxes are being designed and crafted, from the smaller project like Drew’s, to a large toolbox.

Drew first heard about Yestermorrow when a bus showed up at the Slide Ranch in northern California where he was working as a farm-based environmental educator. This bus had been retrofitted complete with a rainwater catchment system, a greenhouse, a biodiesel engine, and solar panels on the roof. Drew wanted to know how he did it.  As it turns out, this man had completed the Certificate in Sustainable Design program at Yestermorrow, and that was when Yestermorrow entered Drew’s life path.

After receiving an art degree from Carleton College in Minnesota, Drew had spent his post-collegiate years teaching environmental science and was inspired by the sustainable infrastructure of the farms and schools in which he worked. “After that I wanted to get some experience with construction, design and woodworking, so that’s what brought me to the Woodworking Certificate program,” Drew explains.

“This is a way I can revive my art career by being a craftsman.” As an educator, Drew has a strong drive to help people be self-sufficient, and “woodworking is one critical skill people need to know about.” No matter where his career takes him, Drew knows that he will be able to use his woodworking skills to sustain or supplement his living.

With an impassioned voice, Drew shares his revelations from these early stages of the program, “Whether it’s a log, or a board or a chair, wood is always trying to tell you where it came from. It gets us back in touch.”

By Nic Tuf

Permaculture...Supersized!

By Nic Tuff

            As permaculture continues to permeate the agricultural and ecological landscape – in backyards, farms and eco-villages – some forward-thinking practitioners are seeing the potential of this revolutionary design philosophy to be utilized at a more far-reaching macro scale.

            In this vanguard are Yestermorrow instructors Andrew Faust and Lisa DePiano, and the recently completed first offering of their Permaculture for Regional Planning: Ecological Models for Economic Development course could be considered a landmark moment in the evolution of this innovative design practice.

The crux of the course focused on how to create resilient, self-reliant communities which maximize the potential of the respective eco-region. In an age when extreme weather and petroleum dependence are increasingly threatening the fragile fabric on which our socio-economic systems are based, this class explored how this holistic practice can offer a solution-based response to even the direst issues threatening the health and wealth of our social, economic and ecological systems.

Focusing on a bioregional approach, Faust and DePiano emphasized that every backyard, every watershed and every bioregion has within it a potential – some hidden, some realized, some unrealized (much in our current land economy that remains unrealized).  Solar gain, soil fertility, existing infrastructure and so many other factors contribute to the potential of a respective land, region or city.  Through this lens, permaculture offers an expansive means to understand the potential in applying socially and ecologically sound techniques to help communities reclaim the means of production and to catalyze microenterprise to help make their place more resilient and sustainable. 

This class cultivated the insight and offered the tools to make our communities more healthy, self-reliant, and resilient; by diversifying their economic and ecological foundation in a way that is both efficient and capitalizes on their potential.  Through case studies, field trips and hands-on learning, students were offered a paradigm for professionals and citizens alike to apply the design methodology and principles of permaculture to retrofitting infrastructure at a regional scale.

The next offering of this course is not yet scheduled, but if you would like to be notified when it is, click the “Early Bird Registration” button on this page:

https://yestermorrow.org/workshops/detail/permaculture-for-regional-planning