David Rauschenbach

The Swangkee Farm is a treasure trove of permanent construction prototypes. A common design primitive found on the farm is the Swangkee 2' x 2' solid concrete column. (Note: Swangkee means first class quality.)

The 9'-tall column shown here was built in 2008, at a material cost of less than $200! Now lets stop and think this over for a moment. Such columns, or narrower, are usually found holding up 6- to 8-story parking garages. How many thousands of years do you think that this column, if properly tiled, could hold up your earth-covered roof, which roof would never need repair work of any kind, other than your extended household just “doing the gardening” up there?

And, now that you've seen what a couple of hundred bucks can buy, do you still think your wooden/plastic firetrap house is worth its inflated bubble price of ¼, ½, or 1 million dollars, when everyone knows that, if left alone, it is no more than 30 years away from the trash heap — that is, if a tornado, fire, flood, or earthquake doesn't get to it first!?

Construction, Bill of Materials, and Cost

The columns on the Swangkee farm are made using four 2' x 2' x 3' aluminum forms, lined with greenhouse plastic, which form up a single 3'-tall block. One block consists of 4 batches of concrete, or, to save money, 3 batches of concrete, plus large rough rocks (See page 4 of the Large Swangkee Cistern project for better pictures on how large washed rocks save on concrete).

One batch of concrete consists of 1 bag of cement, 2 bags of sand, and 3 bags of gravel. The cement sells for $11 (2008), and the sand+gravel goes for another $11, which makes the cost of a batch $22.

That makes the total cost of a 2x2x3 block $66 to $88, depending on whether rocks are used to save on concrete. Likewise, a column consisting of 3 stacked blocks has a cost of $198 to $264.

The upper block of a 2x2x9 Column under construction (click to enlarge)

Swangkee Tool House Columns

These columns were poured along the south face of the Swangkee Tool House, in order to form a frame for some insulated-pane glass that might be put up in the future, in order to form the first story of a 2-story solar heat-collecting house. The columns would get tiled with granite, and the inside face of the toolhouse with black granite, in order to capture plenty of sunlight during the day/summer, in order to distribute much later during the night/winter, for various purposes.

Three 2x2x9 Columns, adjacent to the Tool House (click to enlarge)

Monetary Musings

The Swangkee Farm demonstrates that permanent construction methods are cheaper than wrong construction methods, and that permanent construction can be achieved by rich and poor alike. Furthermore, by adopting permanent construction methods, we can raise everyone's standard of living, because of the effects of accumulative wealth, whereby everyone just naturally spends less time and money rebuilding things that were designed for destruction.

Pont du Gard, still standing and paying dividends after 2,000 years

It seems like a paradox that we cannot afford to build a house correctly, and yet, at the same time, we can somehow afford to REBUILD a house every 30 years, piece by piece, while hauling the old house off to the trash dump, piece by piece, while also paying 2.5 times the price of the house in banker's fees. Obviously, a shortage of money is not the problem, and the paradox is not really a paradox at all.

The Swangkee farm prototypes assert that permanent construction is money, suitable for backing a currency. In fact, such a currency would have some competitive advantages over currencies backed by gold or silver. For example, it would pay a dividend, if designed in a sufficiently inspiring manner, as the pictures on this page illustrate. And, it can directly provide for the logistical needs and physical security of a group of souls (food & water supplies, and associated infrastructure for living and working), which money would otherwise be exported and expensed as a “cost of living”.

I would like someone to tell me a better way to store their money than in broad daylight, on land backed by the sovereign status of the occupying government. To steal your permanent construction, someone has to overthrow the government, occupy the land, evict the inhabitants, and convince all the trading partners to continue to do business with them. But, to steal your gold, someone only needs to rob the vault, through legislation or violence, which happens all the time and even on national TV, just as it happened to the Mayans. In other words, it is far easier to rob a vault, and blow up a building or whatever, than to steal or “repatriate” your foreign property such as your condo at Machu Picchu, especially if you are squatting on it.

Machu Picchu, still standing and paying dividends after 550 years (click to enlarge)

Therefore, people who build and occupy city-states built with permanent construction techniques would probably become gold and silver accumulators, because of either selling out and repeating the enterprise elsewhere, using gold and silver for settlement of such transactions, or simply by saving and accumulating all the money that would traditionally be squandered on unwanted banker's loans, and traditional planned-obsolescence materials such as wood, plastic, steel, clay, or trash of some sort, in addition to the fire, flood, tornado, and earthquake insurance required by those inferior materials, as a hedge against their eventual and inevitable demise!

More importantly, the inhabitants would simply BE richer, by living in a place where no expense is spared for ANYTHING, because all aspects of its construction have First Class Quality in mind, since the quality and permanence of the work, plus the utility and beauty of its architecture all adds up to its total value. Likewise, the purity of gold in a lump of metal, plus the utility of its alloy and beauty of its mint adds up to the inherent value of the bar or coin.

Rome's Pantheon, still standing and paying dividends after 2,000 years (click to enlarge)

Conclusion

Permanent construction has left an undeniable mark on the face of the earth. It is a modern oddity that such work is not being performed today on any scale, nor has it been performed for quite some time. Perhaps without coincidence, these modern times have also been a time of dabbling with experimental definitions of money and wealth, which is not ending as well as some had hoped. In light of this global monetary catastrophe, a return to fundamentals is in order.

The Great Pyramid at Giza, still standing and paying dividends after 4,500+ years (click to enlarge)