Anderson Sustainable Architecture

05/11/2026

Lights out alert! Turn your lights off tonight as there is a major bird migration event this evening!

01/18/2025

I worked on this project, assisting with the details of the exterior envelope and the atriums.

10/21/2024

Reasonable, practical and necessary.

06/15/2022

"Living soil is vital to life". "52% of agricultural soils are already degraded." We can ill afford to allow our ability to grow food on land. There is a Save Soil Walkathon this weekend starting on the south shore of Lake Bee Make Ska Park at 10am. I hope to see you there.
I am hopeful we can save our soil, our oceans, lakes and rivers. Common sense reasons to decrease our carbon footprint.

https://www.consciousplanet.org/walkathon

"By 2045, it is expected we will be producing 40% less food than what we are producing right now, and our population will be 9.3 billion people. This is not a world you want to live in, and that is not a world you want to leave our children. - SADHGURU

- "52% of agricultural soils are already degraded.

- Over 2 billion people suffer from nutritional deficiencies.

- A tablespoon of soil contains more microbes than there are humans on the planet."

09/09/2021

A great presentation on the size of our solar system and of all the galaxies that are out there. It is amazing do you think about the scale and the fact that the sun warms our planet and sustains life.

01/03/2021

Cohousing is a great way to live sustainably and gain close neighbors and a community at the same time. Please come a virtually visit our conversations on building and living sustainably in a community setting.

Saturday, January 23, 2021 at 10am on Zoom

08/15/2020

This is a great story about living with the land. Taking what the world gives and working with it, not against it. What energy and creativity this gentlemen has. Being with a place until you know what you want to grow out of it. Great form and structural intuition. A mix of the first generation of passive design, using the sun to heat the earth and water for storage, and active solar to generate electricity. Adding the second generation of Passive House, you can build like this or take some items from it, in a less mild climate like Minnesota.

My dad was a maker. We had a farm, planted trees, built a sawmill, sawed trees and created lumber, built a barn. He was an amateur geneticist, but as a veterinarian, he worked on the animal side. My dad could weld. He built a dump truck off a truck frame. Built a 4-wheel ATV and 2 duck/fishing scows scratch. Worked on building an airplane. Built one of our houses we lived in. Nothing as nice as this. I wish I could have shared this with him.

I'm glad I had a rainy Friday night to relax and enjoy this video.

Mark

In 1968, Charles Bello and his wife, Vanna Rae, moved onto 240 acres of redwood forest looking to live a simpler life off the land. They had spent their savi...

04/22/2020

Happy Earth Day!
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Thank You to all our our clients, for all you have done and are doing for our planet, your local ecosystem and for keeping yourselves healthier in your interior environment. Keeping ourselves healthier in our homes has maybe never been as important as right now.

Earth Day talks to me about how we're all connected and necessary for each others ability to thrive. The earth and the sun nourish us, give us oxygen, clean water, fresh air and beauty, without measure or comparison. It is natural, right and balanced that we give the same back. What relationship thrives or survives that is not nourished?
JoAnne and Randy live in a Passive House that has a solar array to provide their electrical energy. They grow food their property and in an attached green house that we designed to grow food year round. Also attached is a root cellar designed to store their food and protect them during storms. Part of a large family, their home pivots from a living/working/future retiring home for two, to a gathering space with open cooking, eating and living area, a guest bedroom, and screen porch that can become a 4-season sleeping room with a wood stove (pictured above).

And they built a large portion of the home themselves. They are amazing. Not a construction tradesman, Randy, with JoAnnes bookkeeping prowess, managed and self-performed a lot of the construction work. Of special note, Randy, JoAnne and family friends built the homes insulated and waterproofed concrete foundations. With care, attention to detail and skill they did a job a professional concrete crew would be proud of.

I am grateful for their sharing their home on the MRES Solar Home Tour last October. They led tours through their beautiful home home and shared its personal and eco-friendly design features. I was very happy with how proud they were of their new home. How they spoke of how it served how they lived, how comfortable they were through freezing winters, how little energy their home required and how much energy it generated. How they were learning what crops grew best in their greenhouse.

I want to thank JoAnne and Randy for the opportunity to work with them, learn and express their goals in their new home, share my skills and grow my sustainable design business. I appreciate the opportunity to share our lives, time and talents with you.

Happy Earth Day to all. May we enjoy the blessings of this great, warm spring day! May we thrive with our planet for generations to come.

Mark

10/18/2019

Thank you Lisa Bond with Lisa Bond Photography for your photographic skills, artistry and service. See Lisa Bond Photography work at http://www.lisabondphotography.com.

We are posting this to provide background to our new project page on interior design work. ​I like to describe my personal style as "Warm Modern". It includes objects with simple and beautiful...

10/09/2019

Our work provides beauty and function inside and out.

We are posting this to provide background to our new project page on interior design work. ​I like to describe my personal style as "Warm Modern". It includes objects with simple and beautiful...