[Lapg] From BoHo Rancho to Eco-Chateau. . .

[twist at thelearningparty.com]

>From BoHo Rancho to Eco-Chateau

NOHO MIRACLE MAKE-OVER

It didn’t look like much.

Just another drab, low-slung Valley rancho pad. Musty & dusty on the
outside, generic, anonymous.

An inconspicuous front entrance, with sparse and mostly browning grass.
Obviously no one had watered the lawn in some time–whether by intention
or neglect, it was hard to say. The numbers 6903, all slightly at off
angles, hung over an old 50s metal mailbox by the door.

Around the side, past a pine tree, a cinderblock wall leaned at a jaunty
angle, perpetually tagged and perpetually painted over. Across the wall, a
scruffy side-yard was visible, hosting two chickens (Molly & Polly, or
“MoPo” or “PoMo” — as you wish!), an old compost bin, and a hodge
podge of veggies; brussel sprouts sprouted into the air like some
surrealist organic sculpture. A two car garage, with a broken down 60s
volvo in front. Hidden in the back, a pool, with 99 cent store plastic
furniture, some baby avocado trees and succulents in pots, a few cigarette
butts, and the latest glitch techno emanating from a bedroom window. On the
other side of the masonry wall, a rooster cockadoodledooed.

But something about this place was different.

Perhaps it was the old graffiti mural in the sunroom: once depicting a sort
of canine-robotic warrior of the techno-apocalypse, flames and fossil fumes
on the horizon, that had been later zapped with a heart-chakra explosion of
green and yellow flowering. Perhaps it was the long-simmering
crystallization of the simple funky faith of Moontribish folk who had once
resided there, pounding and chanting their dreaming rhythms into the walls,
floors and ceilings.

Its landlord–”LL”– had decided to sell the place just as the
housing market was heading south. Her asking price was not easily met, and
she had just given her last tenants, after a five year stretch, a notice to
vacate. The lease-holding couple, “Idioma” and “Odnu,” were moving
to Argentina in any case.

They’d been a fairly reliable, pleasantly artsy bunch (if you discounted
the occasional late rent check and boho slacker vibe, at any rate), but
she’d grown tired of the house and decided to double her early 90s
investment while she could.

Surprising, perhaps, that a hardnosed business lady like LL had decided to
take a gamble on a visionary proposal to turn the house into a model
sustainable home and community arts center of the 21st century.

In its place, in a flat 6 months, a stupendous transformation had taken
place.

What once was a typical suburban home, sucking in fossil fuel energy and
resources from afar, spewing waste (paper, plastics, sewage, styrofoam,
discarded techno toys), had now morphed into a stunning demo site for
“One Planet Living,” acclaimed in local and international media as the
latest example in string of radical green living experiments, in the style
of Pasadena’s Path to Freedom and SilverLake’s Eco-Home.

Risen now, . . . was a two story-plus structure dominating the street,
partially encased in a translucent, delicate architecture of glass panes,
and filled with fruiting tropical plants. A suburban home, encased in a
30-foot high greenhouse, a community center for sustainable arts.

Just what the doctor ordered, for global warming and peak oil.

Solar panels lining the upper parts of the greenhouse generated so much
energy there was power to spare for the rest of the block, via a microgrid,
and kept the house 100% off the grid, with the help of a custom-built
hydrogen storage system.

The microgrid ran on custom code written by local teen hackers, the central
node built by Burning Man engineers. It collected excess juice from the
grid, juice from other solar arrays and small biogas converters scattered
around the block, and a few faintly turning micro-windmills, and
redistributed it when and where necessary. When things were really tight,
electron-wise, everybody on the block jumped on their exercycles–refitted
and networked — to lose love-handles and keep the lights on.

The house also offered free power-ups to visiting plug-in electric
vehicles, next to a rack of free neighborhood bikes, donated by neighbors
and thrift stores, and reconditioned by the middle school kids across the
street.

Vaccuum-tube solar condensers on the roofs kept the interior of the house
at a comfortable 75 degrees, no matter how hot the surrounding air. While
the air was humid, from all the moisture prevented from leaking out, a
delicate flow of air throughout the house kept the humidity from being
oppressive. It felt like a nice spot by the Amazon River, on a cool Spring
day.

The structure was now built to recycle 100% of its own water, and water its
gardens from greywater and rainwater. Most people who visited were stunned
to discover that an average LA rainfall, if collected over a .2 acre area,
could generate all the water needs for a family of 5 for an entire year,
including lusher than average gardens.

The old house had been raised from its foundations to create a second
floor, with its roof partially cut open and turned into rooftop garden and
deck. The garage had also been lifted 15 feet up, and now a Gehryesque
walkway connected the two structures. The ground floor was now public
space, open for visiting at most hours. It offered a regular menu of
classes, workshops, and cultural events.

The base of the garage was converted into a small cafe and library–which
the neighborhood had always, most conspicuously, lacked. The upper loft
level was office space. From the loft office, one side of the roof was
completely exposed, covered only by the glassine roof of the
mega-greenhouse. Grape and kiwi vines grew all along the insides, dangling
luscious grapes to within easy plucking range.

Locals sat outside on the permeable driveway, sipping espressos and surfing
the web. Main points of disputation where what kinds of weird weather was
next, celebrity fashion, and whose home footprint was smaller.

The low space underneath the house had been filled with dozens of 3′
cubic plastic water containers, hooked together and powered by pumps.
Undearneath the old driveway, now tiled with permeable paving, a large
rainwater cistern held overflow capacity. The old mini-pool was now a pond,
with waterlillies, frogs, tilapia, carp, dragonflies, reeds and cattails.

The pond was not, however, self-contained.

In fact, it formed only the last piece in a chain of staggered vats lining
the north side of the house, each vat linked into the next, and all
containing a shocking variety of plant and animal and microbial life,
coordinated to funnel and clean household grey and even toilet water to the
point of legal drinkability. Exclamation mark indeed.

It was a “living machine” a term coined by bioneer John Todd in the
60s–a method of treating wastewater based on purely biological
processes–look, no toxic chemicals, ma!–, and successfully applied in
communities around the world like Arcata, California.

To enter the house, you passed through a vine-tangled gate opposite the
Madison middle-school, under a bas-relief of a cute black kitten drinking a
glass of water, (Chat-Eau ;-) a dreadful visual pun few visitors would even
bother to decipher). Within the greenhouse, jammed with herbs and fruiting
vines and more types of edible plants than you could even count, and
stepping over a small stream that circled around the property . . . So much
fruit ripened along the sides of the house it was hard work not to keep it
all from over-ripening and wasting. In fact, the caretakers of the
“Eco-Chateau” were in a friendly competition with the Dervaes Family to
see if they could beat Path-to-Freedom’s record of 3 tons of edible food
per year grown on a similarly sized lot in Pasadena. While many herbs and
flowers were planted in the ground, most dwarf citruses and vegetables were
in self-watering containers, which minimized water loss from evaporation,
and also lessened watering chores.

Wide windows lined the front of the house. Inside you can see an open
bright space, with a spiral staircase near the front. The door is open.
Walking in, you’re shocked to find a loft-like open central space
spanning the two floors–no longer your typical rancho layout. Upstairs a
kitchen, offices and/or bedrooms surround the open space, and towards the
back, the roof gives wat completely onto the blue of the sky, fringed by
more hanging vines, flowers, lianas, orchids…

The plumbing from the kitchen and bathrooms upstairs is all in stark
relief, and you can follow its flow of piping down and around to the living
machine outside, where the wastewater is recycled and regenerated for
further use. Colorful digital interfaces at eye-level indicate water usage
on a graph. The sensors are networked throughout the house into a program
that maps the resource use against that of a standard suburban home. Other
devices monitor “phantom loads” of electronic devices. And of course,
only a single incandescent bulb remains in the house, a tip of the hat to
the past. Everything else is compact fluorescent. The real-time digital
output display on a wall shows how many earths are being used at any given
moment.

They’ve made an art out of the eminently practical. Of course, it
wasn’t easy getting the municipality of North Hollywood to grant
exemptions to the otherwise cumbersome greywater and sanitation codes that
prevented most projects like this from attaining legal status in the old
days.

But the urgency of the situation had finally helped dissolve old
bureaucratic prejudices. This was still the only living machine allowed in
LA, on a test-basis, to feed into real food-producing gardens! Of course
the water quality was monitored on a continuous basis by LADWP scientists,
who’d already been experimenting with living machines at their Agoura
Hills test site.
How did it all happen? What kind of unexpected, social magic allowed this
“miracle make-over” to take place in next to no time at all?

Stay Tuned for Chapter Two of our Thrilling Tale,

NoHo-Miracle-Make-Over: From Boho Rancho to Eco-Chateau.

Who knows, maybe even YOU are a starring character!

Countdown to May 1, 2007. . .

. . . tick tock tick tock . . . hint hint. . . 

PS-I am currently preparing a plan to purchase this property and realize
this vision, either under a LLC partnership or a non-profit (probably under
Earthways). Please let me know if you want to be involved, or kept in the
loop. I'll be having a vision circle and presentation at the house in the
next 2 weeks. (818) 859-8235. Jason

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