Power and control has been one of the overriding human emotions since we absorbed our gills and our tails and emerged staggering from the primordial slime.
Throughout the history of the civilised – and not so civilised – world, one part of society has struggled to exert its authority over the other – and the construction industry is no different.
For centuries and centuries, like birds finding twigs for nests, we have built shelter for ourselves out of the sticks and stones and raw materials that we could find for ourselves nearby.
But freedom and self reliance doesn’t grow profit margins for multinationals and freethinking, freeform building is a nightmare for the increasingly power-hungry centralised state that needs to control ever more aspects of our lives. It’s so much simpler to wrap everyone up in regulations and make them believer’s in a dependency on the infrastructure of a well developed construction industry – then the mechanisms of control fall into place and power is within their grasp.
And it does seem to work… We now know we can’t make anything out of wood unless we’ve bought it from a timber merchant, we certainly can’t build walls without bricks and mortar and we surely need tiles and battens and the funny liner paper stuff for roofs. oh and it all has to be straight or how will we make sense of it.
In the same sway that children think cakes can only be bought from supermarkets and burgers only come from Macdonald’s we are now worshippers in the cult of provision at the alter of The Saints Travis, Perkins and Jewson.
It’s all so terribly disempowering.
The thing about sustainable building – and the whole principle of the Dome Garden itself -is that we are trying to break out of the accepted norms. It’s not because we are political reactionaries, far from it.
This is about us. About learning to explore for ourselves and finding our own way.
Five years ago we wrote about it in the first version of this website – …to once again feel the sand or grass between our toes, that defined the seasons before the accelerating speed of the life lead us away and dampened our senses.
It’s still about that – in fact, more so – our sense are still dampened – suffocated even. We still need to turn the clock back to try and remember why the days were warmer and the summers were longer. To reconnect with a less complicated life where we see who we really are and look again at what is important and who those people are around us that we live with.
So, that’s what this was about!!! All bundled up in a few plastic bags, a lot of earth, a bit of straw from the local farm and the blood (more than we expected), sweat (more than we expected) and tears (more than we expected) of some honest, hard work.(you know how it goes now!)
Salvation and freedom and liberty can only be a step away!