Thank you so much for starting this thread! This is something I've been thinking about so much.

I want very much to discuss ideas in a book, The Production of Houses. Architect Christopher Alexander is often considered either a genius or madman. I'm in the genius opinion camp. But the problem is that his long career has produced long and interconnected threads of thinking about quite fundamental things.

The book, The Production of Houses is I believe is a way to gain some insight into Alexander's ideas and how those ideas interrelate. One problem with the book is that it's essentially an academic piece about an academic experiment played out in the real world. It is a "how to" book in a sense, but the "how to" is often very specific to the particular project, building houses in Mexicali Mexico. It does seem possible and desirable to extrapolate from this experiment to the Opok Farm Village, but that takes some doing.

I was so excited by Norbert's interested in soil cement block making. I have been doing a bit of research on that, and trying to figure out a useful way of presenting some of that information here at Ned. But as I've been thinking, I also wanted to relate that to ideas in this book The Production of Houses. One idea was to use my personal news page to begin laying out some of the ideas in the book.

It occurs to me I can do that in a workspace here. This is something that will take me some time and effort to do. It's not as if I automatically imagine that people will find it useful. But I suppose it is the case that feedback, especially of the sort: "no this is not useful" is important to me as I would rather not waste time doing futile things.

I'm busy today and going out tonight. But I will try to make a workspace for soil cement blocks and the production of houses here tomorrow. Tell me if that's not okay, and if my efforts in those matters is useless.