To be able to start making paving blocks, Marta and I will try to organize a workshop opposite the Elementary school. A permanent workshop, which would work first as a testing area - so that the locals can come and have a look how to make bricks. The position across the road from school is deliberate. The workshop is to develop into "Pliny's playground, where enhancements, he has been testing and building in his Centre For Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, could be transplanted and adjusted to local specifics. Pliny's playground would generate and gather resources for a "fab lab" - a space for rent, workshop and tools and knowledge for rent. Slowly perhaps the school kids would be organized to come visit, locals would use the facility to improve their homes. Pliny would come and run a workshop, so would Texas A&M. Slowly the Fab lab would generate employment from block making, start selling it. The fab lab could also venture into making timber building components from Salt Cedar - the invasive species blocking nearby Rio Grande River.
Over production could be sold to the rest of the Texas via rail running at the southern edge of Las Lomas.
Both the Pliny's playground and the Fab lab would be a permanent venture at Las Lomas. Las Lomas already is an example Colonia, which has managed to arrange electricity, water, sewage. It already is a place of contact and expertise.
When starting a new colonia, from scratch, from Caliche, it would seem logical to start from a fab lab.
A collective "factory" that would be built on the empty future colonia, conveniently for everyone (in the middle?) this would be where the layer of caliche soil would be gathered, tested, dried, mixed, turned into blocks, cement... ; This is where the people who bought a piece of land, hoping to over time - incrementally build their house, could gather forces, cut out middle men, do in bulk, locally.
Fab lab would be their locker rooms, showers, workshop, material store, tool hire, share, swap. Their notice board, perhaps meeting room, site office, shade, site toilet, fridge.
I imagine the fab lab to be a courtyard with material in the middle - drying, mixing, and sheds around it with workshops and the rest.
When the fab lab finishes its primary function - to build the colonia, the new life, which has already begun, kicks in - it has already established itself as a centre, a public building, all routes lead to it and from it, metaphorically, and maybe physically. The hierarchy of the residents has been negotiated on her grounds, she was there at the beginning of the founding of the city. She is the Zocalo, the Square, with the town hall, the prison and the church.
I am very happy about this idea coming along to me, as the establishing of the new town was to be my next problem. Now. I can jump to the next one - how to ensure the cultural heritage transfere of the future residents?
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