The meaning of this special family collaboration
Six adults and three kids worked together to build an handmade earthen pizza oven during the holidays in Southern California and learned a lot in the process
This year we built a pizza oven for Christmas. This was an utterly new kind of experience for me and an incredible learning and bonding experience.
I'm a researcher, and my job involves making things out of ideas, questions, words, and conversations. I have a few scattered experiences of building things — memories from middle school woodworking class, sand castles at the beach — but this was entirely of a different scale. Working with actual three-dimensional materials like sand, brick, and mud to build an actual appliance is a totally different ball game, as I found out.
We dove in, tried, struggled and failed and tried again, and ultimately over a winter month in southern California, me and my family actually created an actual thing that takes up space that can bake wood-fired pizza. Pretty delicious pizza, too.
What made me want to do this
I am on a constant quest to find or invent activities that bring me and my family members together to do creative things together with our bodies and without the need for screens or digital media. I find these activities meaningful, wholesome, inspiring, and joyous. They become the fodder for fascinating conversations and increasingly exciting creative plans.
Past holiday collaborations included, of course, our giant walking labyrinth (which I've shared about here), and our crowning achievement of creating a stop-action animated film using Christmas sugar cookies. We'd never tried anything as ambitious and complicated as building an earthen oven.
I was drawn to the idea of an earth oven after reading a beautiful book on earth architecture, Ceramic Homes and Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own. I could relate to the idealism and poetry of Nader Khalili's writing, and I was intrigued by the practical possibilities. Something deep in my Iranian heritage was stirred. I realized: this, this is actually part of my own indigenous tradition. Building with earth and fire — this is part of who I am, who I was before my Persian ancestors were colonized in so many ways. I started to be more aware of the many ways in which my own mind has been taught to believe that things made of mass-manufactured materials are somehow better — I started to wonder about this. I started to feel a tiny yearning to build and live in a whole village made of these beautiful, gentle little homes.
And then the producer inside me wanted to execute — to do something, to make something happen. Building a whole earth house wasn't, er, realistic, so I started to daydream about smaller scale mini projects. An oven! I was delighted to find many, many videos online on how to build an earthen pizza oven, many of them promising it could be done within a day! I dug in and found Kiko Denzer's resources including his book Build Your Own Earth Oven. Yay! A manual! I believed we could do it. And we did! Read all the gory details in Part 2: How we built our earthen pizza oven [forthcoming].
What the oven gave me
The oven project brought this idealistic researcher into immediate and vivid touch with the earth's elements; with an experience of abject failure followed by literally rising from the ashes; and with a beautiful new reference point for family collaboration.
The earth's elements. I remember a moment when my sister and I were digging, my brother-in-law tending the fire, my nephews and nieces playing in water. How gorgeously wholesome it felt to fill a day with the living stuff of our Earth — to take hours at a strecth off from my usual work scribbling on notepads, talking about ideas, pecking on devices.
Abject failure and rising from the ash. In my everyday work, sometimes things can go badly. A research session can derail, a workshop or presentation can feel a little flat. But there's nothing quite like seeing something you built completely collapse into literally a smoke-belching wreck, drawing bemused and concerned shouts from neighbors. And there's nothing quite like collectively plucking our resolve, in the face of that fail and continued uncertainty, to sweep up the ashes with a six-year-old pal and try it all over again.
A family collaboration. I loved learning about my family members through seeing them in action over the course of this multi-week project! It was great to see what folks gravitated toward, where they set boundaries, how they dealt with frustrating moments, and how they helped each other and contributed, each in their own way, to the project.
Version 1.0 didn’t work at all. A few moments later it caved in spectacularly. But we didn’t give up!
Dreaming forward
I'm dreaming of a world where we all get to build things out of earth, with our hands, together with family and friends.
Where kids get to spend whole days learning joyfully, and safely, directly from earth, water, and fire — getting an understanding of the complexity of everyday objects, through building them.
Where people of all ages collaborate to build whole villages, using consent-based decision-making systems that enfranchies even the youngest among us to translate their vision into reality. Where we embrace the vivid and undeniable experience of our constructions' collapse, and support each other through failure, and learn from it.
I'm dreaming of a world where we can literally live in hamlets we have made using materials we touched, in structures we understand. Where we no longer need exotic and opaque materials freight-delivered to us by vehicles burning precious fuels ripped carelessly from our fragile planet. Where we can build comfortable, meaningful, usable works with what's right under our feet. (Plus maybe a few things from Home Depot.)
I know that an earth oven for making pizzas in isn't the most sustainable thing in the world. It actually takes quite a lot of resources to build it. And a whole lot of wood to get it hot for a pretty short time. I see this as a kind of investment in R&D. If we keep practicing, we can make more fuel-efficient ovens more sustainably; I hope eventually this kind of project will become part of the curriculum of every home and school.
I'm dreaming of a sparklingly fun, 100%-child-friendly world, with rounded corners everywhere, an enlivenment of Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language crystallized into reality from the implicate order it lives in right now. I'm dreaming of hot tubs, garden benches, fire pits, and tiny homes hand-wrought with the tiniest of beloved hands. I'm dreaming that forces conspiring to accelerate this possibility are already right here in our human awareness. We are ready for a more fun world — we are ready to spend our afternoons collaborating on beautiful soulful harmless projects. We are ready. Let's begin.
Protecting our oven from the rain with an improvised teepee and umbrellas, we tasted a bite of pizza homemade pizza from our family-made oven