Anthi Valavani

Review of Centre for Alternative Technol...

I just came back from the CAT today. I visited wit...

I just came back from the CAT today. I visited with my MSc programme, from UCL (MSc EDE). The people were really kind and welcoming, helpful with anything we needed and had everything prepared for our group, with no problems coming up. The food was quite decent I believe, always more than enought to eat, fresh and very filling, following vegetarian diet. My room in the WISE building was very nice and quite warm, although some other students claimed that their rooms were freezing cold, maybe mecause they were facing south or east. Mine was facing west and was quite warm, so no problems. The WISE building is only 3 years old, very interesting structure, built with wood, rammed earth and hemp-crete walls. The interior wood was not painted, which aesthetically was excellent, but it smelled quite a lot, probably because of insufficient ventilation. A very negative thing that I have to mention is their toilets. I don't know why, but the smell was horrible in the common toilets, it was so strong that it was "stuck" on my nose for hours..and I have a very poor sense of smell. They looked like nobody ever sanitized them.
What was really interesting is the variety of the buildings' structures, as they included strawbale, rammed earth, cob, wood, hemp-crete, etc. Too bad our schedule was too tight so we didn't have a detailed touring around the complex, but I'm pretty sure it would be very enlightening and interesting.
There were several hand-made structures scattered around the complex, related to wood craft, renewable energy, advanced technology and up-cycling, etc.
I totally recommend it because it something that you don't really meet every day. I definitely want to go back and explore more things about it and maybe attend some classes.