Redesigning RESPECT! 1976's Winona: Towards An Energy Conserving Community

I used to love strolling though the stacks of the Alcuin Library in Collegeville, Minnesota.  Though uncomfortably modern, the massive building housed a world-renowned collection of ancient manuscripts.  It's brutally minimalist architecture demanded respect.


As I fished for knowledge, it always floored me how painfully irrelevant or misleading the majority of books seemed.  A minority of books caught my eye, a select few proved captivating, and the occasional gem would boost my faith in humanity.


The Alcuin Library basement is an underground bomb shelter of smooth grey concrete lined with endless stacks of ancient books.  Well, ancient by my standards, anyway... and spanning the spectrum of topics which had been banished to "The Dungeon".  Most of the books down there were nonsensical, incomprehensible, or worse, but The Dungeon also yielded  the sweetest fruits.  That's where I discovered Thoreau's Journal, Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti, and the under-appreciated works of Kurt Vonnegut.

I'll never forget finding one of the greatest books I discovered in college.  It jumped out at me from the discard stack, so I bought it for a quarter.  The soft cover, coffee-table-sized book caught my eye because my hometown's name graced it's cover.  WINONA: Towards an Energy Conserving Community.

The book is the product of a year's work (1974-75) by the Energy Design Studio at the University of Minnesota School of Architecture.  A group of graduate students under the guidance of visionary architect Dennis R. Holloway modeled the transition of Winona, MN towards sustainability.  It was written in response to the energy issues America was facing at the time due to US domestic oil production decline after it's 1970 peak and unpredictable oil prices due to the mid-70s' OPEC oil embargo.  

In Winona: Towards An Energy Conserving Community they laid out the blueprint, timeline, and motivation for turning my hometown of 30,000 people into a self-sustaining, re-localized community.  All the particulars of Peak Oil were explained lucidly.  The integrated solutions we needed to transition towards sustainability were showcased thoroughly.  Basically, everything we should have started doing 25 years ago was laid out in great detail in that 35 year old book.

This visionary work by University of Minnesota architecture students would have been so inspiring to read in the year of my birth, 1981.  When I stumbled across it in 2004 it spoke more of humanity's greed, foolishness, and capacity to deny the obvious.  Though so simple a child could understand it, this book was apparently so ahead of it's time that even now most people haven't awakened to it's truths.

The collective consciousness has been so thoroughly raped by misinformation, distraction, and spin that obvious solutions to obvious problems meet near universal resistance.  Humanity seems bent on doing things the hard way.  Let's change that.

Here's a good place to start... even if we are 35 years late to the Appropriate Technologists' Party.

More pages of Winona: Towards an Energy Conserving Community are available here.

Note the graph of Peak Fossil Fuel Usage behind these guys hand-stenciling letters on a display back in the mid-70s'.  We got the point then, so why can't we admit it again now?

And remember: always check the discard pile.  How's that old saying go?  Oh yeah...