Coming from a country with a poor (okay, with 0) tradition in moving from the urban to the rural areas, Dyssekilde was a curiosity of nature for me. And because there have already been published really good articles on the eco-village I'm not going to repeat the same information all over again. Head off to Alda - here and here - for comprehensive presentations or to Domen, here, for an interview with one of the artists in the village. (Speaking of which, if you plan to publish your interviews, come back here and leave a comment with your link)

What I am going to focus is Dyssekilde's houses and architecture. Dwellings, cribs, shaks, condos or whatever else you may call them in your country, the houses in the eco-village may not win a "design the house of the future" contest but they're all fine representations of sustainable building and living.

The eco-village now has around 70 households, out of which most are privately owned. If you can't afford to buy one (in fact, of what I understood, there is only one left for sale *the last pictured above* at a bargain price of around 480k euros), there are also a handfull of shared houses (the last image in the series, scroll down the page) and two larger buildings with apartments for rent.

With energy needs incorporated into their architecture, with simple heat & light efficient systems - glass walls for the southern facades, with solar cells and solar water heating (with the help of suncatchers set on their roofs) and an efficient use of sustainable energy sources (i.e. "the willow jungle" - a simple but reliable ground heating system or mass ovens that polute less), people in Dyssekilde seem to have found the right recipe of merging recycled materials (hay, bricks, glass, or tiles) with human work force (most of the houses are built either by their owners or by local craftsmen) and this is how houses eventually become homes.  

Large piles of wood are kept outside these interesting looking houses and also help with heating. The upcoming plans are to build one huge shed that would stock the wood necessities for all the village. Some houses have compost toilets that the inhabitants empty once a year when they need manure for their gardens. Rainwater is also collected and reused at the laundry in the community house, at the shop and bakery, in the gardens and what's left of it is preserved in the "rain water lake" inhabited by frogs and ducks. So Dyssekilde's buildings are proofs of the "reuse, reduce, recycle" mantra and should open a couple more doors to further exploration of the opportunities that come along with the concept of recycled houses.

The jaw dropping feature of these houses - and this is where I wanted to get from the start - is that all inhabitants own/rent just the house making every other area common grounds for everyone else. Tresspassing and fence/s are missing from Dyssekilde's dictionary.

And you know what? Dyssekilde is not the 7th heaven, with pink clouds and angels playing their harps, but it's a village with sustainable alternative homes that people (at least the ones in my country) should consider building before harassing and suing each other for no real reasons, over the biggest house on the market.