~ The Quarries EcoVillage ~
Fred Øesch (Co-Founder)
“The Quarries EcoVillage”
Schuyler, Virginia
1999 – Current
The Quarries is an EcoVillage in Schuyler, Virginia – about thirty minutes from Charlottesville and forty-five minutes from Lynchburg. The 580 acres of the community are divided among 43 wooded, private lots that used to belong to a former soapstone quarry. Lot owners share a commitment to sustainable, eco-friendly home-building practices, as well as promoting a sense of community through common walking trails, recreational quarries, and common lands.
The Quarries is truly a place where people can enjoy the privacy that nature has to offer, while living near great neighbors, a wonderful university town, and the scenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
An ecovillage is a neighborhood or community where the residents are committed to treading lightly on the earth and living in a manner that is ecologically, economically and spiritually sustainable.
The Quarries are being developed to provide affordable housing and live/work spaces on a formerly scarred tract of ground. The principles of regenerative environmental design shall be emphasized. Our concepts of environmental reality must facilitate both the present and the future we desire for ourselves and our children’s children. Personal, social, political, cultural and spiritual fibers must all be seemlessly interwoven into an architectural fabric which nourishes the beauty and health of both our individual and collective homes in the cosmos.
The place of man is not only to live in harmony with nature, but also to exhault, celebrate and express the great sense of awe, wonder and creativity of mankind. Thus, ecologically responsivle architecture should be a stimulating artistic expression and testament, of the people who design, build and inhabit the buildings of their dreams.
We should celebrate that within us which is human. What should be taken seriously … is the joy. We can evolve a higher order of cultural cohesion and a sense of future destiny. Manifesting least effort and maximum advantage, our built environment can have meaning not only in the present, but also embrace accountability and consequence, by anticipating and providing an inherent potential responsiveness to future needs and conditions.
At The Quarries, we seek to empower you to re-establish the inter-relationship between the processes of conceiving, making and using buildings and the landscape through a dedication to craft and beauty in the built environment, while stressing a deep concern for the environment via today’s available building technologies.
We can return to the Earth more than we have taken. We can contribute to the