Prism

Teacher Feature

FEATURED Professor Tom Carlson on SciFri



"Select something that puts a fire in your belly." - Tom Carlson

Arana Gulch

WALK at Arana Gulch

messy chicken coop

Messiness helps us avoid simplistic thinking. Instead of wanting everything neat and smooth and clear, we remember that a healthy forest has all stages of growth in it... A healthy forest has seedlings and young trees and adult trees with full canopies and dead trees that haven't fallen yet. This reminds us that our simple intentions and generalizations have no correlation in nature. Nature is complex, and its complexity can help us to be more complex in our thinking.  - John Elder, The Sun Magazine, Issue #450 (interview here)


This excerpt reminds me of the process involved in designing and building the chicken coop at our house in Live Oak. While researching different coops and their elements, we came upon the philosophical question of the square. Why are most hen houses, all houses, rectangular or square; what is lost in reducing a home to a square? Nothing that is alive ever grows into the shape of a rectangle or square; rather, it seems that living things tend to form irregularly and respond in real time to changing conditions, bending, curving, and twisting to a complex rhythm. 

To challenge the square, for fun, and motivated by the idea of fresh eggs, we decided to construct a non-square chicken coop made purely of scrap materials. Custom building a structure with no money and irregular materials proved slow and cumbersome, requiring a skill set unpracticed in our square-centric, consumerist and conformist lives. It took about two months of spare time to harvest enough live bamboo from the patch out back, stripping it, tying the poles into larger bundles, collecting irregular pieces of thrown-out chicken wire and wood scraps. Building required attention to all corners and meetings of individual materials; we literally knitted the coop together using string, tying poles to scraps of chicken wire and bending pieces to fit together. 

Although it looks like a messy, makeshift shack (because it is), our bamboo scrap coop is lovely and safely houses seven beautiful chickens. When let out each morning, the chickens run in a random scurry, flapping their wings and free to do whatever they want. Each night, they place themselves up on the roost, ready to be shut in. 

So why are most hen houses, all houses, rectangular or square; what is lost in reducing a home to a square? It seems that modern systems of production, including the manufacturing of building materials, are confined to a square-normative process of construction, for reasons that assume a certain type of efficiency while ignoring other types of efficiencies. 

It is value-based. A square building values simplicity, large-scale control and immediate stability, predictability at the cost of complexity, adaptation and responsiveness. The alternative building requires a very different skill set and knowledge base to construct a form able to respond in real time to changing conditions, bending, curving, and twisting to a complex rhythm. 

Now, a poem:

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.