Square Peg in a Round House

I have periodically linked to an interview with Bill Coperthwaite. The link changes periodically. Here is a new link of the same wonderful old interview. Now there is a wonderful new interview with him at Boston.com titled, Square peg in a round house: Yurt evangelist, 75, still spreads his gospel of self-sufficiency

What a man to learn from! I could place him on my list of 'fathers I would liked to have grown up learning from', in addition to my own wonderful dad of course.

"Coperthwaite not only lives in a yurt, a housing form conceived by nomadic Mongols on the steppes of Central Asia 2,500 years ago, but he has made it a cornerstone of his working life. He once built and lived in a yurt where the Harvard Graduate School of Education library stands today. He is founder and director of the Yurt Foundation, a nonprofit research institute he operates from his outpost. He has spent much of his time teaching others to construct the circular dwellings, and his pupils have built structures ranging from a public health center in northeastern India to a backyard playhouse at a Montessori school in Austin, Texas.

"The main thrust of my work is not simple living, not yurt design, not social change, although each of these is important and receives large blocks of my time," he reflects in his book. ''But they are not central. My central concern is encouraging people to seek, to experiment, to plan, to create, and to dream. If enough people do this we will find a better way."

His thoughts and research are presented in "A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity" (Chelsea Green, 2003).
Maybe I'll have to learn from him that way. Sigh..

Thanks to All Things Maine for the link, who btw, also has another link to an annotated guide of works by another of my fantasy fathers.

posted by Cyndy | link | | |
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