Local food.    Local energy.    Now, Local building.

Now more than ever before, we know how to build with local resources - with whatever you find nearby. You can build great homes without burning a lot of fossil fuel, without wasting a lot of money, and without surrounding yourself with weird chemicals. You can build well with earth, bamboo, and straw. You can build well with plastic bottles, reclaimed lumber and shipping containers. You can build well with ice and snow, or sand and gravel, even water and air. Call it natural building, or deep green building, or just smart building, but it's just using your brains instead of fossil fuels to provide shelter, comfort and safety. It's about building well.

This is what our clever ancestors did, all over the world, and now the collective knowledge and experience of ten thousand years of architecture, science, and building is at your disposal. All you need is easy access to all that knowledge, and that is what this site is here for.

We are an open, collaborative, growing group of builders, scientists, architects and engineers sharing the best knowledge we can find for everyone's benefit. Here you will find practical and technical guidance by which to design and construct better buildings, wherever you are. Whether you are building a straw bale home in Argentina, a low-income village with shipping containers in Shanghai, or a concrete office structure in Sacramento, we have information you can use.

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