Welcome to the TEAL Community!
So you want to live in a natural and peaceful, yet enriching environment, with friendly neighbors who share your interests and concerns? In an eco-community with meaningful connections to the world? An eco-community is a place where people and nature live in harmony with each other and the Community-Innovation website will show you how to plan and build such a community, and become part of it.
Inspiration
Source: The Fifth Sacred Thing is a 1993 post-apocalyptic novel by Starhawk. The title refers to the classical elements of fire, earth, air, and water, plus the fifth element, spirit, accessible when one has balanced the other four.
The novel describes a world set in the year 2048 after a catastrophe which has fractured the United States into several nations. The protagonists live in San Francisco and have evolved in the direction of Ecotopia, reverting to a sustainable economy, using wind power, local agriculture, and the like.
Ecotopia was also the name of the first Eco-house in Belgium. In 1993 Garsett Larosse and friends bought a dilapidated hotel in Westmalle and renovated it according to bio-ecological rules. It was to an extent also a circular house, using artists and waste material to create e.g. a beautiful marble floor (made with waste from a bathroom manufacturer), a 'cosmic bar' and Gaudi-washrooms (with old tiles), art furniture made of driftwood and exhaust pipes (by Gregor Kartai), using natural materials wherever possible (indigenous wood, vermiculite and bio-cork for insulation, bio-paint etc).
The Cosmic Bar made with indigenous wood.
Front: Bronze Dolphins Delight sculpture
picture above: one of the bathrooms with the 'New Dawn' theme. (Philip Hamer)
picture left: the marble floor with the 'Trees of Life'.
Ecotopia was sold in 2011 to a group health practice.
A new company was created: Made with Love Productions.
Not much later the Made with Love Projects Foundation was set up with the aim of supporting eco-artistic communities and developing TEAL: Transformational Eco-Artistic Living.
Houses in Damanhur, an eco-community in North Italy.
Early sketches of the TEAL Eco-Community Center
We became aware that communities of eco-artistic people would benefit a lot of a place where they can meet and organize all kinds of transformational activities: workshops about integral health, permaculture, a space for co-working and co-learning, art studios, a recording studio, a community kitchen,...
Early eco-community design by Garsett Larosse and Michael Langley.
The new approach is to be modular, scalable, to a large extent circular* and sustainable.
* circular: in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life.
Picture below: a single octagon can be used as a 'tiny home'. We prefer to call it a 'super yurt'. ?
With 8 straight sides of 4 meter it has a lot of practical walls.
Replace one of this walls with a tunnel greenhouse and you not only invite light and nature into your home, but you can also connect it to a second octagon for larger families, work studios etc.
Many different configurations of single octagons, duo-octagons and the integrated eco-community center(s) can be formed to create an eco-resort or eco-village.
(picture left)
Prototypes / 3D-models
Effe Studio, Francesco Mazzoni
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