What I would like to afford

Stipend

$4,000 / month take-home

Housing, food, health care, phone and internet, transportation, clothing, paperwork, and enough savings to absorb the occasional bad month.

A residency

$2,000,000

Land and construction for the home I would like to build: a long earth-contact house, practical workrooms, a glass greenhouse corridor, and a garden dome with water and warm sand.

The residency

I would like to build a long earth-contact home for ordinary life, plants, animals, making things, and experiments that need space and time.

Explore the house →
Aerial architectural view of the connected earth-contact property: a long low house and north hillock, partly buried west garage, glass-roofed southeast tower, greenhouse corridor, circular garden dome and pool, south field, fence, and woodland
The aerial view shows the long earth-contact house, west garage, glass tower, greenhouse corridor, garden dome, field, and woodland as one connected property.

01

Pasture-facing bedroom

A broad window looks directly onto grass, rain, trees, and morning light.

  • bedroom window
  • pasture
  • trees
  • dew

02

Living rooms and sunken commons

Warm mineral plaster, pale stone, mahogany, terracotta, plants, and deep blue-green carpet tie the rooms together.

  • sunken commons
  • mineral plaster
  • pale stone
  • mahogany
  • blue-green carpet

03

Workshop and laboratories

A general shop, 3D-printing room, compute lab, and optics and camera lab built for daily use and easy cleanup.

  • workshop
  • 3D printer
  • compute lab
  • camera lab

04

Thermal-mass corridor

A thick masonry passage with water storage moderates temperature as it connects the main house to the greenhouse.

  • thermal mass
  • water reserve
  • masonry hall

05

Tropical greenhouse corridor

A long glass passage for fruiting plants, warm humidity, birds, and a daily walk through living things.

  • banana plants
  • hibiscus
  • birds
  • greenhouse path

06

Glass pool room and sand beach

A tall circular conservatory at the end of the greenhouse holds the pool, warm sand, and its own humid air.

  • pool
  • sand beach
  • water
  • warm air

A grant for a residency would cover the land and construction: the earth-contact house and hillock, sunken commons, west garage, greenhouse corridor, garden dome and pool, workshop, and laboratory rooms.

Independent research

$24,000 / year

I would use this for compute, hosting, storage, books and papers, test hardware, fabrication materials, travel to verify a result, and the cost of publishing or exhibiting finished work.

Things I would like to have

General workshop

$15,000

Benches, hand tools, measurement, repair, and material storage.

  • workbench
  • hand tools
  • measurement
  • material storage

3D printing station

$4,000

A printer, ventilation, finishing tools, and practical material stock.

  • 3D printer
  • ventilation
  • filament
  • finishing tools

Compute lab

$20,000

Local compute, storage, displays, networking, and power protection.

  • compute nodes
  • storage
  • displays
  • power protection

Optics / camera lab

$30,000

Cameras, lenses, lighting, optical support, calibration, and capture hardware.

  • cameras
  • lenses
  • lighting
  • optical bench
  • calibration targets

Life at the residency

I would like to share it with a lover who enjoys a quiet, pastoral life, one or two cats, birds in the greenhouse, and—if life goes that way—a future family.

  • lover
  • cats
  • greenhouse birds
  • future family
Pasture-facing bedroom with thick petrol blue-green carpet, dark mahogany furniture, operable broad glazing, cream linen, and warm dawn light over the field

Morning starts at the pasture window.

Dew on the grass, warm plaster, dark mahogany, petrol blue-green carpet, and the first cup of the day.

Freestanding bent-glass greenhouse corridor with glazing on both sides, a clear central aisle, black thermal-water barrels, fruiting tropical plants, and the garden dome ahead

The greenhouse is a hallway.

A long glass passage connects the house to the pool through fruit trees, humidity, birds, and daylight.

Warm evening sitting room with thick petrol blue-green carpet, mahogany furniture, concealed cove light, low lamps, plants, and two resting cats

The living room after dark.

Low lamps, a closed notebook, two cats, and rooms that are still comfortable when no work is happening.

Things I want to build

Projects worth having room for.

A workshop, greenhouse, yard, and uninterrupted time would let me try these. Some may work; some may teach me exactly why they do not.

Fiberglass being formed over a wrapped exercise ball beside an open loop-antenna shell and a finished white radome on a stone pillar

Project 01

A fiberglass housing for an all-weather loop antenna

I would shape a fiberglass shell over an exercise ball, finish it with weatherproof white paint, fit the loop inside, and mount the radome on a stone or concrete pillar.

Compact blue plastic shredder, melter, and injection mold with colorful recycled crab and fish pieces on a workshop bench

Project 02

A coin-operated plastic recycling and extrusion machine

A guarded shredder feeds clean scrap into a small melter and injector. Insert a coin, add plastic, and the mold ejects a crab, fish, or another small toy.

Ice cream bananas, open ice cream bean pods, a hand-cranked churn, and a bowl of pale ice cream in a tropical greenhouse

Project 03

Ice cream made from ice cream bananas and ice cream beans

I want to grow both fruits and use them together to make ice cream ice cream: a literal dessert assembled from the names on the plants.

Low battery-powered remote equipment mover lifting a utility trailer from beneath its hitch in a farm yard

Project 04

A battery-powered remote equipment mover

A low battery-powered machine slips under a trailer hitch, lifts it, and moves trailers or other heavy equipment through spaces too tight for a tractor.

A continuous waterfall conceals the actual entrance in a pale earth-contact house while a curved wooden side approach reaches the dry passage behind the water

Project 05

An over-the-doorway waterfall, rock garden, and pool

A sheet of water would conceal the entrance. The pool, liner, stonework, hoses, and planted edges would be built around a wooden side approach that reaches a dry passage behind the falls.

Massive perennial tomato trunks spreading into a fruiting overhead trellis canopy inside a bright greenhouse

Project 06

A giant overhead perennial tomato garden

I would train a few long-lived tomato vines across the greenhouse ceiling until they form one enormous fruiting canopy that can be tended from below.

Bamboo shoots at many growth stages inside a sealed transparent plant chamber surrounded by imaging and measurement tools

Project 07

A mutant bamboo that never stops growing

I want to test whether selected bamboo tissue can keep dividing faster or longer than ordinary controls. It belongs in a sealed plant room with daily imaging and measured samples, not loose in the greenhouse.

Watercolor side section of terraced ponds feeding an orchard, herbs, flowers, vegetables, onions, garlic, and ginseng, with one tiny stick figure

Project 08

A multi-tier lake system and terraced permaculture environment

Swales, embankments, sluices, and stepped ponds would organize an orchard, herbs, flowers, vegetables, garlic, onions, ginseng, and more as one water-sharing landscape.

Watercolor side section from a roadside berm through thorn hedge, trees, bamboo, and wet swale to a screened garden home with one tiny stick figure

Project 09

A natural defensive barricade for the estate

Roadside berms, thorn hedges, closely planted trees, bamboo, a wet swale, and changes in grade would make the approach difficult for highway robbers while leaving the inner garden pastoral.

Row of sealed cooled glass grow cabinets containing rocky alpine beds and compact rare herbs inside a greenhouse laboratory

Project 10

A hermetic alpine grow complex for kutki and rare herbs

Sealed, cooled growing rooms would reproduce alpine air, moisture, light, and rocky soil closely enough for me to try cultivating kutki and other difficult herbs without taking them from the wild.

One long low Beverage receiving antenna wire mounted on a truss railcar spanning a circular track in a misty Mississippi field, with pivoting terminal arms at both ends and a central rotation bearing

Project 11

A steerable Beverage antenna on a rotating railcar

I would mount one long, low Beverage wire along a truss railcar that turns around a circular track. Pivoting feed and termination arms at the two ends would hold the wire and its electrical geometry while the whole car rotates to point the antenna toward a chosen bearing.

Tall bubbling green algae bioreactor columns in a vegetable garden connected by hoses and an air duct to the house

Project 12

A home-air carbon dioxide algae filter

Transparent garden bioreactors circulate household air through growing algae. I want to measure how much carbon dioxide they remove, how quickly they foul, and whether they improve indoor air in practice.

Hollow Greek-god-shaped wire mesh sculpture with a blue bug light suspended in its empty chest beside ground-mounted solar panels at night

Project 13

A solar-powered mosquito-catching sculpture

A hollow conductive mesh forms the figure of a Greek god. At night, a blue bug light inside its chest draws mosquitoes toward the contact grid.

Neck-high serpentine garden wall of irregular hollow recycled-glass bricks in green, amber, blue, aqua, and clear glass beside a molding workshop

Project 14

A recycled-glass brick wall and molding machine

I would melt discarded bottles into irregular hollow bricks, then build a neck-high serpentine garden wall whose greens, ambers, blues, and clear glass change with the sun.

Watercolor view across many deep rows of pale green honeydew melons growing on vines in an abundant farm field

Project 15

A honeydew melon farm

I would plant lots and lots of honeydew melons: enough pale green fruit to make abundance the main visual fact of the field.

Watercolor interior of a steaming rock-lined shower room where a wooden walkway crosses a pool through surrounding curtains of water to a giant square rainfall showerhead

Project 16

A total-immersion shower room

A wooden walkway would cross a warm pool into rocks, steam, and falling water. At the far end, one would walk beneath the surrounding rain; at the heart of the room, one enormous square head would supply a perfectly uniform vertical shower.

Watercolor side cutaway where a buried cool-air duct from a distant brick intake and a warm duct from the greenhouse top join in one mixing chamber and rise into the earth-contact house

Project 17

A two-temperature earth-air system

One duct would draw cooler air from a small brick intake tower on a distant hillock and temper it underground. A second would collect warm air from the top of the greenhouse thermal reserve beside a dark absorbing surface. The two routes would merge at the house.

Architectural cutaway of a corrugated grain-silo guesthouse with two full storeys, a partial roof loft, central second-floor bathroom, elevator, first-floor bay and door through the earth berm, and a separate buried Quonset garage

Project 18

The fortress guesthouse

I want to use the largest Sukup grain silo I can obtain, roughly fifty-two feet tall, as a two-and-a-half-story home. An exposed bay window and door would interrupt the one-story earth berm; inside would be an elevator, a central second-floor bathroom, and a standing-height room beneath translucent sections of the sloping roof. The full height would drive convective circulation. A buried Quonset-hut garage with its own entrance would sit beside it.