Life in Uncertain Times

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Salute' Vittorio,
Our great friend Sam always keeps me up to date about your life in Florence, and especially likes to tell me about times when you came to his boat.  I always wish I could have been there, and promise myself to make the effort to visit again, to see you, and maybe to get on Sam's boat for once, before he lets it go.

I did make an effort to visit the east coast for this past Christmas and New Year holidays, visiting family and attending Sam and Bean's now-famous New Years Eve Party, my first time.  As you can imagine, it was really fun.  Sam's friends, Bean's friends, quite a sampling of New York City people, all delightful, as one would expect, since they have all won the friendship of our best friend Sam.  There is a man so full of life that he binds us together like the strongest glue.

Tony Argibay performed very well in his standard role as Champagne Bartender.  Tony is a very well-loved man, and he wears life with confidence, wisdom and humor.  It is always a pleasure to see him.  We enjoyed an early dinner on New Years day, Tony Sam and I, with our ladies chatting up the other end of the table, and we reminisced about you and toasted to your health, and we talked about the quickly changing world around us.

Before dawn on Saturday, January 2nd, I slipped into a taxi on 14th St, leaving my sleeping wife in her warm bed in the apartment upstairs, and flew home to Colorado.  Jan worked another week in the Victorinox Swiss Army Manhattan design studio, before she came home to the mountains.

Fresh snow and bitter cold weather awaited me at home.  The day after I arrived was a fine day to be skiing, sunny with 30cm of fresh, fine powder snow.  I have a little "gig" I perform for the skiing company, once a week on Sundays, I don a uniform and provide guided tours to guests on Aspen Mountain, as well as provide other helful services for them.  For this, I receive an unlimited pass to ski the lifts on all four mountains.  You would think I'd be out there every day, but I barely ski more than half a dozen extra days a year, because I have too much else going on.

My architectural practice has undergone a large shift, one that has finally brought balance to my life.  I have started a new company with an old friend, a farmer and permaculture guru, here in Basalt.  His name is Jerome Osentowski.  He is of Polish descent of course, from a family that homesteaded farm land in Nebraska during the nineteenth century.  Jerome inhabits a small body, which he keeps in near-perfect health, by growing all of his own food, on a small pice of mountainside land he bought for almost nothing 30 years ago.  Three kilometers and 200 meters above Basalt, Jerome has a ramshackle home with an attached greenhouse, in which lives a 25-year-old fig tree that gives him two crops between July and Octber every year.  He also has two other greenhouses, one attached to a cabin he rents out, and the third a large - 9 meter by 20 meter tropical house.  This largest one is home to tomatoes, greens, basil and many other herbs, and a diverse array of tropical and mediterranean perennials, such as banana, mango, pomegranate, pineapple, papaya, guava, passionfruit, jujube, and grapes.  Surrounding all of his greenhouses is an acre of hillside landscape Jerome calls a "Forest Garden", in which there are fruit and nut trees, berries, vegetables, greens, herbs, nitrogen-fixing plants and trees, a pond, numerous enclosures for chickens, turkeys and rabbits, all surrounded by a tall deer fence, and guarded from within by a very smart dog.  All of Jerome's greenhouses are heated and cooled by the intelligent and low-energy storage of solar gain.  Here in the mountains, we have a lot of solar gain.  When the sun is on the greenhouses, fans pull the warm, moist air off the top, and store it underground through a network of perforated tubes arranged in layers and buried in compacted soil before the greenhouse was built.  This storage cools the greenhouse during times of solar surplus, and it warms the greenhouse during dark, cold nights.  An example of the most extreme we've seen the greenhouse handle without backup heat, the indoor temperature falls to 10.C, while the outdoor temperature falls to -15.C, for a relative delta-t of 25 degrees celsius.  If the outdoor temperature falls lower than -15.C, Jerome starts his backup heater, a wood-fired sauna, which will keep the indoor temp at 10.C, until the outdoor temp falls below -30.

Jerome's paradise is called the "Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute", where he teaches classes in high altitude, perennial polycultures for sustainable food production.  He uses only natural organic inputs, and the flavor of the plants and meats he produces there are unsurpassed by anything I've ever tasted.

When Jerome first asked me to design a greenhouse for one of his garden clients about six years ago, he taught me the rudiments of this underground heating storage system, which I have since named a "Climate Battery".  After a couple of these small projects, with which clients were delighted, Jerome and I received a land planning commission to help design a new small development, with edible landscaping, waterways and pathways, as well as an orchard and a community garden/greenhouse.  We started this company called "Eco Systems Design, Inc", and as the work increased, I left my other committments with other architects, and have been doing all my work in this new firm for the past two years.  While all the larger firms I have worked with are losing people to this global economic malaise, we are getting more and more work designing greenhouses, forest gardens and solar homes, and are hiring some of the architects who have left the larger firms.  The design fees we are receiving for this work pale in comparison to the fees we saw for large, custom "trophy homes" in Aspen for the world's wealthy, but it is very good to be designing energy and food producing environments for a healthy future.

So here we are, a growing band of building and landscape architects and a permaculture visionary, designing small and large projects, both private and public, to help create a local educational infrastructure and curriculum for teaching small organic agricultural practice, and to help people create their own energy and food production infrastructure.  We hope this will lead to a more vibrant local economy, like yours in Florence, where we trade with a local vineyard for our wine, or in our case, for our eggs, meat, vegetables and salad greens.  I will write more about this emerging local economy later.

For now, Vittorio, I will wish for you the best, and a promise that I will arrange a visit this year to you in Florence, and to Sam on his boat, wherever that may be.

Ciao, my friend.