Craftsmanship & Making
One of the project’s quiet convictions: making things with your hands is not a lesser form of work. It is a form of thinking.
Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman argues that craftsmanship — the desire to do a job well for its own sake — is a basic human impulse. The project takes this seriously. On the farm, the person who replaces a roof and the person who writes a peer-reviewed article are engaged in the same kind of work: careful, skilled, attentive to material.
“Those were wonderful days, when the value of practical, hands-on work became impressively visible and tangible.”
What Gets Made
Building & Renovation
The most visible craft on the farm. Paweł — itinerant carpenter from the Carpathians, wearing his black vest with silver chains — built new roofs for the workshop and bathroom. Panel by panel, with thick insulating layers and sparkling silver gutters. The stable building’s reconstruction involves masonry, plumbing, electrical work, tiling, staircase construction in beech and ash wood.
Every trade has its own logic. The roofer thinks in weather protection and vapor barriers. The electrician thinks in circuits and load. The plumber thinks in flow and pressure. Managing a renovation means learning to translate between these languages.
Furniture
Old furniture found in the barn and attic is restored rather than replaced. Chests of drawers, beds, chairs — objects that carry the history of the place. New pieces are built from available timber. The workshop, with its retained anvil and workbench, is the space for this work.
Food Production
Cherry, plum, apple, pear, and peach trees produce more than the farm can consume. The surplus becomes ecological jam, fruit cake, and juice. The jam label — designed on the farm — was a creative act that connected agriculture, design, and commerce in a single object.
Design & Objects
Designs, objects, and playful experiments documented in the second volume. The line between craft and art is deliberately blurred. Joseph Beuys’ concept of Soziale Plastik — social sculpture, society as artwork — hovers in the background.
Why It Matters
In a society that increasingly values abstract knowledge work over physical skill, the farm insists on their equality. A roofer and a philosopher, a carpenter and an educator, an electrician and a doctor — all working side by side, all learning from each other.
This is not nostalgia for pre-industrial life. It is a response to the alienation that comes from never seeing the results of your work, never touching the material, never standing back and saying: I built that.
The proposed university discipline of Community Leadership would formalize this integration — combining economics, sociology, architecture, education, and creative arts in a single course of study. Training people not just to think about communities, but to build them.
