OUROBOROS SOUTH & OUROBOROS EAST

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Wilson Clark, Co-Director of Environmental Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., is the author of Energy for Survival published by Doubleday-
Anchor Press in both hard cover and paperback.

I recently visited a St. Paul, Minnesota inner-city house that both was, and wasn't, like the other homes in its community. The dwelling—located on Laurel Avenue, at the periphery of a 30-square-block Model Cities urban redevelopment program—has the square, bulky lines of its neighbors. Unlike them, however, the old building is a live-in test lab for a number of energy conservation ideas. It also will soon contain one of the first solar heating systems to be retrofitted to an "ordinary" urban home.

The house—known as "Ouroboros East"—is being completely renovated by a team of students from the architecture and mechanical engineering departments of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis under the direction of architecture professor Dennis Holloway.

This is the second major project that Holloway has undertaken in an effort to demonstrate that energy self-sufficiency may be possible on a dwelling-by-dwelling basis through the application of solar power, proper design, and the reuse of resources which our culture now squanders and throws away. The name "Ouroboros" has been given to both undertakings, since that mythical serpent regenerates itself by devouring its own tail . . . thus symbolizing the philosophy of recycling.

Professor Holloway's first house, "Ouroboros South", grew out of an environmental design course that he taught early in 1973. The class was broken down into working groups of 10 students and each team was assigned the task of drawing up a specific system for a largely self-sufficient house (which, itself, was mythical at the time). Some groups devised wind power systems, other solar collectors, still others attempted to integrate native materials and local climatic factors into the final design. Taken together, the whole project was aimed squarely at creating a self sufficient dwelling which would recycle its own wastes.

When the class had finished its winter-term assignment, Holloway was so impressed by the results that he decided to solicit backing for the construction of a house built to the students' specifications.

And he was successful! The university contributed land to the project and a number of local businesses and power companies made donations of both materials and funds. Groundbreaking for the dwelling—which contains about 2,000 square feet of living space—took place in mid-1973 and, except for a few minor modifications which remain to be tidied up, the house is now finished.

Ouroboros South is located at the University of Minnesota's Rosemount research station, which is about a 40-minute drive from the main campus. A solar collector—that, for maximum efficiency, slants up at a 60° angle from the horizon—is built into the south wall of the strikingly modern building . . . and the home's north side is a gradually sloping wall of grass-topped earth, similar to the sod roof used for hundreds of years in Scandinavian countries.

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