Thinking globally at Max's pot - bioregional building design

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1989 by Pliny Fisk, III, Gail Vittori, Ray Reece

Indeed, we at Max's Pot have reached a point in our own evolution where we can produce an enormous range of soft-path technical and design solutions for a spectrum of clients from large to small and rich to poor. While the particulars of any one project may be unique, what binds our work together is our approach, which commits us to carefully using available resources while not interfering with a region's natural integrity. We achieve this by adhering to the fundamental attributes inherent in the resources surrounding us, and devising methods to creatively and aesthetically integrate these to achieve a balanced system of life support.

In the past ten years at the Center, for example, we have built a passive solar school for troubled youth and a Girl Scout headquarters from the same indigenous earth material: unfired caliche block formed on site in mini-factories. We have consulted with clients as diverse as Lakota Sioux elders in South Dakota and real estate developers in Dallas, each desiring beautiful, efficient housing derived from their respective regional resources. We have devised myriad techniques and products, like a permeable paving from coal-based fly ash cement and batch solar water heaters, that could be the bases for whole new industries, bioregional or otherwise.

But, even with the broad range of capacities the Center has developed and the breadth of projects completed, our efforts have yet to generate a single autonomous regional economy or even a large-scale development project in which the use of our technologies - straightforward, low-cost, and labor-intensive - has provided permanent jobs for the unemployed and homes for the homeless in distressed communities. We have tried to do this, as we said, not only in Crystal City and Puerto Cabezas but vir- tually everywhere we have worked, including Austin. Here we designed, two years ago, a regional prototype house constructed with materials derived almost entirely from resources native to central Texas. It would be durable, low-cost, and energy-efficient, and its proliferation in Austin alone would create hundreds of long-term jobs. We received awards for that design - one from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from an Austin municipal agency that sponsored an Affordable Housing" design competition. But the house is unbuilt, the jobs uncreated, because, with few exceptions, Austin government and business leaders, like those in positions of national power, are still committed to growth scenarios and building technologies that serve the needs of global corporations and welfare states, rather than the needs of local self-reliance and global ecological viability.

That said, we at the Center remain optimistic about our chances to help effect a soft revolution based on the principles informing our work. We have learned that persistence and stubbornness, coupled with alertness and a thirst for innovation, do pay off, even in backward political environments. Recently, for example, we managed to get the attention of an enlightened official in the Travis County Housing Authority in Austin. This has ted to a county contract to design a community center that will be constructed with indigenous materials - straw clay walls in particular - and a water catchment and storage cistern that becomes the energy source for the building's heat pump, thus providing the requisite heating and cooling. It will be a first for Travis County, perhaps for the United States, and its completion will doubtless help us advance the thinking of other people in our hometown bioregion.