Recently I came to know that our building lease expires in three years, which is an opportunity to make Asmbly even more incredible that what it already is. I also read through our full color booklet showing how many volunteers showed up for the woodshop air filter installation and also learned about the member effort to remake the metal and woodshops by separating them and building the entire interior. I am sure that these events would be qualifiers for building materials loan(s) that would allow us to build a custom designed space to be built modularly by members from scratch if we are willing to purchase the raw land.
Instead of purchasing a building, volunteer members could build an equivalent to what our current building does, PLUS we can expand the campus property to include the following new concepts:
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A Residential Wing: Additional buildings with high-density housing: (small private rooms with shared bath and community kitchen, mini one-bedroom studio apartments, and/or two-bedroom units) to house a few of our members and their families. (This has been done at Janelia in Virginia. Janelia Research Campus | HHMI On-Campus Housing | Janelia Research Campus ) Some of these rooms can be for short stays, others for longer durations. Members could build furniture for these rooms, which could be offered for sale to the visitors.
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Shower area for day users: Many members live far away and often are driving home after a day of working with wood/metal dust/particles/welding fumes on their skin/hair.
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Community Kitchen: The private rooms used by members/visitors/students can use the same kitchen used by members. Food can be prepared here for conference attendees.
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Larger Workareas: Additional acreage allows accepting donations of larger industrial equipment. Having land would provide space to progressively build larger buildings using volunteer labor over time, which would expand our members’ capacity to fabricate larger-scale projects such as bikes, quadricycles, velomobiles, trailers, electric vehicles, dune buggies, drones, airborne systems, bluewater vessels and other crafts.
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Experimental Areas for Decentralized Science (DeSci): Facilities for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ (DAOs) experiments to be conducted for community-led research. (perhaps this could be leased space). Their projects can be built and then refined in the Asmbly build areas.
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An Enhanced Electronics & Radio Frequency Lab: A dedicated workshop equipped for building custom amateur radio transceivers, open-source hardware from scratch and would use a member built antenna tower structure supporting both HAM radio bands and the unlicensed ISM (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) frequencies for use by non-licensed members, and Maker Camp/Homeschool students. The tower would also serve as the physical backbone for deploying an on-campus, off-grid mesh network entirely independent of the commercial internet (for members/students who don’t have an ISP) and can be used by facilities as a walkie talkie tool or to answer the doorbell. Thanks to postings by: @csader Chris Sader Any other HAMs at Asmbly? and @llanford Laura Lanford Any others into amateur (ham) radio?
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A Self Sustainaning Autonomous Power Grid: Space to construct and install volunteer-built solar panels, battery packs, wind towers, telluric current ground-based battery harvesters, and/or a plug-flow anaerobic digester to generate a methane power source alongside facilities for dairy animals. (only possible if we buy land in the Austin Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction (ETJ), which is unincorporated land where the city does not enforce its strict Chapter 25 zoning ordinances) Thanks @ewei Evan Weinberger for mentioning the VanLife Group that was previously active, as this type of project would be of interest by this group. HEB is known to give away old panels - they did this for the Center for Maximum Potential cmpbs.org
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A Public Sculpture Garden: A peaceful, Zen-style outdoor area with walking paths and future-planned landscaping where members can progressively build community projects such as cement sculptures, parabolic acoustic mirrors (already proposed by Evan Powell @flowmage Concrete casting ), Kozyrev Mirrors, and other apparatuses which would be alongside dedicated exhibition spaces where individual creators can showcase their art, abilities, and work on a rotating basis.
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Dedicated Exhibit Hall: Same opportunity for members to showcase their creations as above but indoors.
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An International Event Destination & Learning Center: A larger multipurpose conference community room (perhaps similar to Soleri’s Arcosanti) designed to host international events and festivals, with breakout rooms for classes for attendees. With these facilities, we could host our own yearly events with paying attendees. (Robert Szabo @Rolo mentioned this idea at TWWF). These same classrooms could be used for the MakerCamp/homeschool academy. We could have dedicated rooms for children with smaller work tables and smaller chairs.
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A hands-on project based K-12 homeschool academy: Students would come in perhaps twice every 2 weeks to show the progress of their projects to their teacher or mentor and receive onsite hands on instruction. Their homework and course of studies assignment would be closely tied to using some of the tools and equipment we have on campus to create their projects, which would serve as the basis and core curriculum of the homeschool program. Students would not need to be limited to Austin, as we would provide room and board for students traveling from outside the area. (could be a combination of tuition and scholarships). @ajstow
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Outdoor Mural/Stained glass windows: With so many buildings, we can paint/relief sculpture/make our own ceramic tiles murals/make aquaponics systems on all the walls. (of course well designed to avoid a decommisioning End of aquaponics era 🐟 🌿 ) And custom make all our windows out of stained glass. @rmoglen
All of the above Does not all have to been implemented at once - nor does the financing. We can build a phased approach, starting with the highest priority buildings.
If we use a vertical building technique, then we can optimize the land area for all these ideas. If we can do it all ourselves, then we can avoid construction labor rates and also create a very unique campus. One way to do it could be using Paolo Soleri’s earth casting concrete dirt technique of creating the structural mold of the building using sand, digging into the sand (or earth) for the structural columns, setup the reinforcing steel rebar and pouring concrete into that landscape. Once the concrete cures, we would excavate the earth out from underneath the hardened shell.
Architect Paolo Soleri proposed a city of 5,000 people that would live and work on 15 acres of land, using vertical urban planning based on his earth-casting concrete dirt technique. Certainly we can come up with a smaller design for a scaled down version. Some of our members have experience with this. @sid
Would you be interested in volunteering for any phase of a member built ASMBLY building?
- yes
- no