Welcome to our Summer School 2023 Scrapbook

Students and staff of the Building Beauty community met in a breathtakingly beautiful place and worked together to make it a little more beautiful. They spent 10 days on Jan’s magical farm in rural Slovenia, on a hillside among rolling hills, with a distant view to the Alps. This place is a formerly abandoned farm in a long process of loving repair. The assignment was to make an access footpath leading from its entrance downhill upwards to the house and barn. The students laid out, mocked up, and then built the path with rest stops and benches along the way. In between work sessions, the farm itself sustained them with its nutritious food produce and exceptional beauty.

Congratulations to all who contributed to the restoration of this beautiful place and were restored by it.

We’ll be back.

Jan’s farm in rural Slovenia.

Accommodation in nearby Prežganje.

Discussing with Jan and his dad their vision for the farm. Exploring the land and potential trajectories for the path. Identifying centers and latent centers along and around it. Each student had ten tall green flags for marking their choice of path, and five short blue flags for marking centers. They walked through the land together and discussed all their proposals and considerations. Finally, they identified three areas for three smaller groups to develop in further detail.

A day off to explore the mountain lakes. As the rain caught the group in the afternoon, they drove to the town of Kranj, which has a couple of Plečnik's urban interventions, and had a local sausage dinner.

Each of the three teams started the next day by studying their chosen area more closely and exploring ideas for how to help the path go through them while increasing wholeness. This was followed by mocking up various suggestions, including placing trees to create strong centers.

The next day the whole group reviewed each team's mockup, and provided feedback to reach decisions. It was a very hot day, so they took a long lunch break, and turned the bottom of the barn into a makeshift lecture room where the group heard a discussion about Ljubljana in advance of the next day's excursion to visit there. The rest of the afternoon was spent digging and building stairs from logs, until it was too dark to continue.