What is Natural Building..??? (note-this is left here from the natural building days for your info)

The term "Green Building" has now become a national catchword...convincing the public and builders that there are more responsible, more energy efficient, less toxic ways to create our living spaces. Unfortunately, with that popularity, has come a proliferation of misrepresentation as the conventional manufacturing industry marketing departments simply "green wash" their products...eventually rendering legitimacy and credibility of words like "natural" and "green" problematical.

From this dilemma has sprung the new generation of building practices in which high emphasis is placed on minimizing the uses of manufactured products at all...concentrating on those materials found locally or on site and which can be assembled with the surety that comes from doing it ourselves...the only real assurance we have of a product's content.

Many times, the ingredients necessary to produce truly nontoxic homes for a population which is yearly increasingly sensitized to the chemical toxins in building ingredients can only be safely garnered by site assembly from local resources.

This gives way to a whole new building form, a whole new psychology of living structures, even a new technique for creating the design itself.

Natural building lays much heavier emphasis on the natural landscape surrounding a home and its transition and capacity to provide food sources to the living system itself.

Much of natural building focuses on empowering the owners to do more of the creation of their living environments than green or conventional building....and encourages creating that structure more deliberately and over a longer period of time. It becomes a part of a daily lifestyle in its most optimum form...constantly evolving and changing...as does everything else in life and the universe.

In its ultimate form...which is the one Smart Shelter emphasizes...the building process becomes part of a rhythm, which itself must be designed and simplified to produce harmony.

Of late, emphasis has turned from the creation of new structures...invariably consuming more of an already overeaten pristine environment here...toward the retrofit of existing buildings and homes...which can easily become even more of a nurturing natural home than new construction, because they bring along with them the history of their pasts...something we desperately need to credence more in our culture.