Family home / Intermundos headquarters / Permaculture lab
Since 2008 Casa Biyuka has been growing like a living mushroom in Taganga, a fishing village near Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.
This house has been baptized Casa Biyuka after the Biyuka creek which was almost forgotten until 2010 when it decided to run once more after 50 years of dry silence. Miraculously, this creek ran in the valley below our house for 6 month in 2010 and 3 months in 2011.
Casa Biyuka is to serve as; the home of the Pellegrino/ Gocksch family; as the systema Solar recording studio; Intermundos offices and as a ongoing investigation project for sustainable housing. Casa Biyuka is also one of the the bases of Residencias Intermundos which is a residency program open to musicians, artists, ecologists, communicators, volunteers etc. who whish to to spend a period of time working with us in projects for the community or to develop their own investigations and projects.
The natural conditions of Taganga where the house sits are very dry; there is almost 6 months of absolutely no rain per year and no running water system reaches this property. Water in Casa Biyuka today is our main challenge and so we consider this house to be a laboratory for future scenario housing (in a world with limited water resources). The house is being constructed with ecology and sustainability in mind, most of the materials used are from the land or recycled. The house collects rainwater, has dry bathrooms and passive cooling. We are constructing a blog where the process is being documented (in Spanish) in order that others may learn from our experiences. We hope that our experimental house / living system will eventually be as close as possible to autonomous as we can make it and serve as an inspiration to our community.
To see blog with details of construction process:casa BIYUKA
