art

A Black Lives Matter mural in Oventic, Mexico, several thousand miles from where the Black Lives Matter fight originated. “Black Lives Matter. Everything for everyone. The fight continues.”

From The Transcendental Revolutionary Zapatista Murals of Oventic, Mexico

Kurdish Epic (Ahmad Bag and Khazalee), 33x25 inch, oil on canvas,2004 by Lukman Ahmad

This will likely be my last winter solarpunk scene for a bit – I want to focus on library economies next. This one is based on two different ideas recommended for the village scene, which I decided to combine in their own photobash.

The first was to reconsider icehouses, not necessarily for storing ice for directly cooling food, but as part of a much larger temperature regulation system and meltwater reservoir.

They suggested creating buildings with flat roofs with hatches on top and earthen ramps up the sides, where snow could be hauled in from roads and walkways, pushed up the ramps, and down into the open hatches. They also suggested harvesting ice from a designated pond, which is why I added a pond to the small waterway in the village in my last photobash.

The cool idea (I thought) was that in the summer, the snow and ice can be used as centralized air or water chillers, part of systems for nearby apartment buildings, or, if the buildings are adjacent to barns (as in the village scene) then during deadly heat events the cooling effect could be used to protect the animals. The meltwater could also serve as an additional emergency water source for drought conditions if clean enough, and could even be misted around wilderness water sources to keep wild animals alive during heat disasters.

Otherwise, the meltwater would circulate into coolant loops then get discharged into algae farms or water treatment (because of road/path/roof/track matter scrapings.)

In my design, I decided to have these snow vaults dug as concrete pits in the ground, to make loading them easier. Roller doors and insulation, along with railings and gates, would hopefully make them fairly safe, while the roof would protect them from the sun and rainwater seeping in. This thing might make for snow removal easier in especially snowy years, as they’d have someplace nearby to put a lot of it. Hopefully when they’re filling the vault, an assistant is out keeping watch for pedestrians who might for some reason wander into the pit.

I’m not an engineer, and I know my limits in designing new structures. But I also know that in a lot of systems, cold is a resource, something you always have to create heat to produce. So a big reservoir of free cold has to be useful somehow. I also like the idea of turning a wintertime hassle into a resource, both for temperature regulation and for water supplies.

I decided to combine the snow vault idea with a possible use for some existing Internal Combustion Engine vehicles – conversion to run on woodgas. I think in rural areas, like this village, society will continue to need some independent vehicles. I think in this setting, that doesn’t mean everyone is driving around in personal automobiles, but that some are maintained for specific tasks, by hobbyists, and by farmers, forest managers, and others whose work takes them impractically far from public transit. I think woodgas is a good fit here. It emphasizes reuse of existing machinery instead of new manufacturing. It doesn’t require high-tech electronics like electric vehicles. And it’s less practical for the kind of quick trip to the store or daily commute which has shaped our current society. A woodgas vehicle takes awhile (ten to twenty minutes to start up), can’t easily be stored indoors, and because the fire needs to burn down, doesn’t make much sense for short trips. But in a solarpunk society, most folks shouldn’t need a car for that stuff – they’d be walking or taking public transit. So conversions like this would be used for special trips – hauling produce to town, supplies out to forest management camps, research sites, and other remote locations. And perhaps for road trips by campers and other people who might borrow one for an adventure. The wood can be sustainably sourced, using scraps from sawmills, harvested invasive trees, brush, and even dedicated coppiced plantations of especially fast growing trees like paulownia elongata. One of the byproducts of gassification is biochar, which can be tremendously useful in compost, and holds carbon for a comparatively long time. I also think its important to note that while this can be done well, when these vehicles were previously used in massive numbers (during WWII) they led to deforestation. They make sense in small doses, and with some careful management of their inputs.

Sorry if any details are unclear in the art, I’ve been looking at a lot of Christmas cards lately, and wanted to aim for that aesthetic with this one.

This image and all the other postcards are CC-BY, use them how you like.

Facade of the central library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), painted by Juan O'Gorman (Photo: Unam / Publicity)

Central Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico on Wikipedia

Page on The Central Library's Website

A mural showing a map of Oventic in the shape of a snail or caracol. Oventic is one of the five caracoles, or centers, of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

Oventik more Oventik, always lots of Oventiks. I can no longer live outside of Oventik because for me what I want is to build. And if the bad government wants to destroy us, we’ll make everywhere more Oventik. I won’t go from here, always ready to fight.

From Agua de Lluvia Little Autonomous Community School Celebrates Two-Year Anniversary

Kurdish Art: An Interview with Lukman Ahmad

Zapatista mural from Oventic, Mexico

I've posted a few times around the instance asking for input on this one. huge thanks to everyone for their suggestions! I've tried to include all of them, and have done some others as separate scenes. I have more planned.

I’ve been thinking a lot about rural solarpunk lately. Idyllic farming scenes aside, there aren’t many depictions in solarpunk art of places that look like the towns where I’m from. But the towns where I’m from aren’t very solarpunk, despite being beautiful and full of nature. With cars, people have spread out in these sprawling bedroom communities that are becoming ever more dense with neighborhoods. Gas and groceries are easily a 40-minute drive away (more if you’re looking for a big box store), and I feel like most people I knew growing up drove at least an hour each way for work. When you live there, you’re completely dependent on your vehicles and you sometimes have at least one spare per household.

I’ve also been thinking about how these places might change with some of the societal crumbles and contractions I feel like are impending. Cars rely on a lot of infrastructure all over the world, from their manufacturing, to their maintenance, and fuel is a massive and complex tangle of technologies and politics, dependent on a ton of infrastructure for acquisition, refining, and transportation, and again, maintenance of all those systems. How would rural areas change if cars became impractical (due to shortages etc) and how could things be rebuilt better? Or what would they look like if cars had never taken off the way they did?

In my grandparents’ time, the region where I grew up was lots of small villages, usually bunched up around water and local industry, with farms and forests out beyond that.

So I decided to build this scene around a similar place. A small dense village, served by multiple kinds of public transit, and surrounded by multiple examples of agroforestry, and rewilded forests beyond that.

I realized pretty quickly that this is a bit bigger in scope than most of the things I’ve depicted before. In most of my scenes, I feel like you can usually assume everything else society needs is just out of frame, but with this photobash, aside from anything inside the buildings and under the canopy, you can see the whole place. So I had to try and make sure I included everything they’d need. I’m just one guy whose okay at cutting up images, and I don’t know much about community planning, so I reached out a few times for ideas:

https://slrpnk.net/post/2764472

https://slrpnk.net/post/4535056

https://slrpnk.net/post/4537582

https://slrpnk.net/post/2794425

https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/182w2vh/things_a_solarpunk_village_would_need/

https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/170etfr/what_would_you_like_to_see_in_art_of_a_rural/

And I received quite a few! I’ve tried to include every suggestion (assuming it would fit at this zoomed-out level). I’ve really enjoyed this process – I feel like any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.

So what’s in this scene:

Housing:

• Apartment buildings: To get the density and walkability I've included a clump of four/five story brick apartment buildings (figuring brick can possibly be baked in solar kilns and transported by train) around an open common area near the train station. (I think it can probably be assumed that these are mixed use and the first floor of some are shops and third spaces).
• Multi-family homes
• Houses: further out on the edges of the village, and some along the farms
• Tiny homes: possibly some are used for visitors to the village, or just people who don’t need much space and want more privacy or a better location
• An abandoned McMansion left over from an earlier age, far enough out and in bad enough shape that its not currently in use. Perhaps it will eventually be restored for use, or, if the damage is bad enough or no one needs it, perhaps it will be disassembled for parts/materials.

Recreation:

• An open common area/farmer's market/sometimes sports field
• The top of the train station is an open park and set of community gardens Some rooftops are community gardens
• Pond and surrounding park, possibly stocked with fish for the meat eaters, possibly used for ice harvesting in the winter.
• The river below the village (I'm trying to make it clear the main river swings below the village and there's a bit of a riparian buffer around it)
• Public amphitheater – one of the only man-made structures on the flood plane.
• The billboard in the foreground is part of a project inside the setting, where they’ve replaced any advertizements on the remaining billboards with artwork, just as a sort of public outdoor art gallery.
• Under the tree canopy there’d be parks, playgrounds, and other third places.
• Public workshops/makerspaces

Public transit:

• Train/train station
• Ropeway to a nearby village not directly served by the train

Agriculture:

• Agroforestry: in the foreground we mostly have alley cropping, in the back it looks more like strip cropping or wind breaks. There’s a riparian boundary around the river, and the forest in and around the village is a food forest where people can forage (in addition to sheltering parks, playgrounds, and other things). I’m not any kind of expert on agroforestry, sorry if my depictions have issues.
• A small paulownia elongata pollard plantation (tucked between the barn/recycling warehouse and the biogas generator and algae farm because the wrong type of this tree can be invasive) which are used for woodgas, and also for shelter for animals, possibly goats, who would also help prevent invasive shoots from spreading.
• Solar panel farm with crops planted underneath
• Algae farm (for nutrients or biodiesel?)
• Greenhouses/Walpinis set into the south-facing hillside
• Compost windrows with negative pressure airflow pulling CO2 into the greenhouses/algae farm.
• Grain bins for storage

Industry:

• Workshops/factories: some have waterwheels (fed using a levada style stone channel split from the main river), others are set up on higher ground.
• Road leading down to town, with a work crew hauling back an old car for recycling. Perhaps there’s a bounty type system in place, and this will be loaded on a train to be melted down in a solar furnace further south.

Power sources:

• Solar farm and rooftop solar
• Windmills (though these may belong to the next village)
• Anaerobic Biogas Generation from sewage
• Gas generator converted to run on woodgas

Not visible from here:

Under the canopy/ -Food forests -Parks -Playgrounds

Inside the buildings: -Places of worship -Cafeterias -Other third places

Thanks again for all your help!

Zapatista mural from Oventic, Mexico

Via Shado Mag

Another winter (technically spring) solarpunk scene, this time centered around passive greenhouses. The idea is that since the sun will mostly be coming from one direction in colder climates, you surround the other sides with brick or concrete walls, which absorb heat during the day and radiate it at night (which is when you cover over the plastic). The first time I saw an article about this design I was amazed I’d never considered how poorly standard greenhouses fit our use case up here. I worked on a farm for years growing up and we heated about half of them at least through December. Single or double ply plastic sheets and corrugated white plastic siding nailed to stick frame walls on the ends. Garage doors only on either end. I can’t imagine how much they cost to heat. It’s that one-size-fits-all-just-burn-more-gas approach I think a solarpunk society should reconsider wherever it finds it.

In the photobash, I set these greenhouses into a south-facing hill, to further regulate their temperature. I also included a couple examples of passive heat – black painted water tanks and water barrels, to absorb sunlight and radiate warmth at night, along with bins of compost or manure, which put out both heat and CO2 as they decompose (making up for the lack of an oil furnace exhausting into the space to boost CO2). Some farms further boost the heat and CO2 by sheltering animals inside.

The top greenhouse would run cooler, and has cole crops (kohlrabi, cabbage, ad broccoli) and beans and potatoes in it. The lower house is hotter and has tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and peppers.

The lights are almost entirely for artistic reasons – my favorite winter scenes have the warm yellow light of human spaces contrasted with the almost monochrome blues of the winter outside. I wanted to do a solarpunk scene with that, and the greenhouses were a good fit. (Worst case, we’ll say they’re trying to extend the daylight hours a little). The design in this one likely isn’t perfect – I’ve only ever seen photos of the real thing, and the ones shown online vary but most are much larger than these modest greenhouses. I also didn’t get to include seedbeds, which would probably be the main priority this time of year. Presumably, they have deer fences erected further out.

Made in response to this post – on the realization that there aren’t many examples of solarpunk art set in winter.

One thing I've been considering is if snow rollers, or a modern take on packing down snow instead of plowing it out of the way, might make a comeback in a society with fewer cars and snowy winters. Around here, they used to use sleighs in the winter, and snow rollers pulled by oxen to flatten the roads for travel. The idea of shoveling an entire road bare so you could drive on it would probably have seemed pretty extravagant to them.

It’s an idea that’s been rattling around in my head for awhile. There’s a sizable contingent in solarpunk spaces who are very much in favor of society deprioritizing cars and focusing on trains and other public transit options. If our solarpunk society has resource limitations, as most societies do, and they're prioritizing big infrastructure stuff like trains, ropeways, etc, it's possible that roads would fall apart pretty quick.

Around here at least, roads, bridges, etc require constant maintenance to remain anywhere approaching drivable. Winter breaks them with frost heaves and potholes, spring turns their footings to muddy slop or washes them away in floods. The maintenance is constant and expensive.

I feel like a society where most people take the train, and ride bikes, would find themselves wondering why they need to maintain a lot of these roads to a drivable level. Especially if this solarpunk community is rebuilding after our current society goes through a span of societal crumbles and leaves them with even more infrastructure debt. I tend to set these pictures in that period of post-post-apoclyptic rebuilding, after places like my hometown have already condensed back towards smaller, denser villages, rather than the sprawling pseudo-suburbia we have now. (Out of necessary due to societal crumbles and cars/gas becoming less reliable.) Towns here used to have multiple small clumps of houses and industry built around walking, with big spans of farms and forest between them where you'd catch a wagon or car ride to a town with a train station.

So in this setting, I imagine trains and ropeways link these small, dense villages. Primary roads to other towns are maintained, along with ones leading to nearby farms, but there are probably a lot of abandoned developments an impractical distance out, linked by roads that have been mostly left to break up and wash out just because the society doesn’t have the means or a strong reason to maintain them. Perhaps they’re letting some areas rewild, maybe they only make jaunts out on these old roads to disassemble houses for all their useful parts, and to return the lots to nature.

I imagine that sometimes, the ropeways don’t follow the main roads. Perhaps they take more direct routs, or cross spans where bridges have collapsed and haven’t been replaced. Most of the time they’d follow some kind of road, just because that makes it easier for the work crews who build and maintain them, but perhaps these roads aren’t active enough to justify plowing all winter. Seasonality is a good concept for solarpunk societies, I feel like a solarpunk society would consider seasonal means of travel.

I imagine a lot of these secondary roads are used as winter trails, packed down with snow groomers and traveled by people on cross country skis, snowshoes, sleighs, perhaps electric snowmobiles or those bicycle/sled contraptions.

That’s where I set this one. A seasonal road used as a winter trail, followed for some of its course by a ropeway. On either end of that cable, the villages are lit and warm, their streets plowed, but out here, its just the quiet static hiss of snow falling, the creak of the pulleys overhead, and the rumbling of the groomer crew making a pass to pack the trail.

This image and all the postcards are CC-BY, use them how you like.

A quick one based on u/Sam-Nales's comment about combining airship mooring masts with screw conveyors/screw elevators similar to those used by grain silos on my last post over on reddit. I talked it over with the folks on the farming community: https://slrpnk.net/post/3643695 and feel like there's a definite place for grain and silos in a solarpunk world. This was a quick one, the zoomed out scenes often are.

I'm not sure a mooring mast is entirely necessary here, with the big, recently-reaped fields to land on, but perhaps this farm is using a system compatible to other farms nearby who use more agroforestry, and wouldn't necessarily like having to clear a patch of empty land just for landing airships

Another glance at the more industrial parts of this solarpunk future. This one was inspired by the absolutely massive mountain of clothes which has been dumped, brand new and unsold, in the Atacama desert in Chile. The product of our society’s fast fashion industry and the complexities of our supply chains, a tremendous amount of energy and water is wasted producing these clothes, more energy is wasted shipping them, and then yet more is spent to haul them into the desert where they smother the landscape and ecosystem in cheap synthetic materials.

One of my overarching goals with this series is to show a society institutionally focused on reuse, rather than extraction and production. A society that thinks further ahead than we do, which produces what it needs, and thinks carefully about how to use and reuse and repurpose what it makes. A society where the wealth of usable product we currently throw away is treated like a natural resource to be found and traded between peoples engaged in the thousand year cleanup. I hope that in this future, the fast fashion industry is long dead, and that whatever demand for its products remains can be met using the absurd backlog of clothes produced unnecessarily and heaped in the driest desert in the world.

Which brings me to my other goal for this photobash. I’ve been wanting to do a scene with airships ever since the discussion we had here. In fact, I’ll probably do a few. Despite seeing relatively little use, airship design has advanced tremendously in the last hundred years. Improved materials have allowed them to take more effective shapes, and improved engines, motors, batteries, and computer systems, have made them much easier to control. While reading about historical airships, I was struck by the risk in doing almost anything with them, but especially by landing – which often required ground crews (‘landing parties’) of hundreds of men who would by strength of muscle, pull the thing down to the ground. By contrast, modern airships can land themselves right on the ground.

They also have pretty good potential as a sort of closed-loop system: If you covered the top of an airship with solar panels, you would have significant generation capacity, especially above the clouds (solar panels work better in the cold). You could use this to drive electric motors, and excess power could be used to generate hydrogen for both lift and fuel. This just needs water, which also makes an excellent ballast.

Helium is another option, but it’s a limited resource which, as I understand it, requires drilling to obtain.

Airships could open up some really cool possibilities: while they lack the speed of a jet, they have more capacity, and lower fuel requirements. While they lack the sheer capacity of a container ship, they're a lot faster and use way less fuel. They can also fly over land, meaning they can reach all kinds of places ships can't, and cut long detours around continents. Basically, container ships might be able to carry more, but they’re not as good at going from Boston to Seattle, and they suck at getting to Kansas City. What’s more, airships can act as flying cranes, lifting bulky objects like wind turbines or assembled buildings right over obstacles, and to places where roads or trains simply couldn’t carry them.

For the layout of this airshipyard, I decided that though modern airships can just land on the ground, the process of clearing and building a landing pad is environmentally destructive enough that this society would probably want to prioritize lower-impact mooring masts for waiting airships, and build just enough pads to match their loading capacity. This definitely wasn’t just because mooring masts, with the airships weathervaning around their tops in the wind, are tremendously cool. Or because the ugly metal towers reinforce some themes I've been playing with, trying to show that even in an aspirational solarpunk future, there are going to be places that don't look aesthetic but where utilitarian, practical designs make the most sense, and can have a beauty of their own.

I also included a massive airship shed, as I thought that even a smaller shipyard like this might need a maintenance capability and shelter for damaged airships grounded in bad weather. I’m not sure how well they could service the variety of craft currently moored, but hopefully with modern technology they can make it work. I imagine that the main airship yards would be located at major cities, and that these airships have already dropped off cargoes from their own points of origin, and are here to collect old world clothing and materials made from clothing.

The airships themselves are mostly pulled from modern designs and prototypes, with solar panels added to their tops. I’m particularly fond of ones like the Flying Whale on the top right, which can apparently work like a flying crane and winch cargo directly into the hold without landing.

Once this cleanup is complete, the mooring towers and buildings can be partially disassembled, and carried to the next place using the airships themselves. Hopefully all that will be left behind is the footings of the towers and a concrete slab in the desert with a plaque which reads something like ‘On this spot old world corporations made an ungodly mess. And generations of people worked hard to clean it up.’

This image, and the rest of the postcards are all CC-BY, use them how you want. Also: big thanks to @loopgru @Five, and @cynar@lemmy.world for telling me enough about airships to get started on this one!

This is my second, slightly more serious photobash of a ropeway.

Like I said before, I really like the idea that the rural towns in this setting all have some kind of reliable public transit option - the larger ones (or ones conveniently placed) are linked by high speed rail, and others nearby might link to those (and to eachother) with ropeways. Easier/cheaper to set up over rough terrain, great view, and pretty reliable - you always know there’s another car coming.

Given the distances between rural towns, I feel like they might need to run several ropeways to cover the distance. Ideally the terminals (the ends of the ropeway) would be in a town, but sometimes, like here, they may just be up in the mountains, which I think could provide a really cool option for a sort of local community hub in an otherwise fairly inaccessible place. (From a bit of reading about ropeways, my understanding is that the drive is at one end, and the other just has the mechanisms for unhooking and rehooking the cabs, and comms back to the drive - if that's the case, then the main motors and power supplies would be in the towns at either end, leaving this spot fairly uncluttered). A basic transfer station might just have the two ropeway terminals and perhaps some restrooms, but I feel like really nice ones could be this sort of base camp and waystation for hikers, rock climbers, and other people enjoying the outdoors. It might have some kind of communal dining hall, bathrooms, perhaps even sleeping quarters. People might hike up to this spot for lunch, or start their adventure here. Or, if they've been hiking from peak to peak for weeks, they might rest up or even catch a ropeway down into a town to resupply.

https://www.deviantart.com/tamberella/art/The-Greenhouse-798298900

I've been working on a photobash of a rural village for the last couple weeks - it's in a more realistic style and has lots and lots of elements, so it's taking forever and I'm sick of looking at it. So today I took a break and banged this out.

Povoq suggested ropeways (which I grew up calling gondolas, thinking of them as a ski mountain thing) when I was asking for ideas for the village. They're a great transportation option, so I added one to it, but I got thinking about other scenes I could do with the concept. One of those ideas was a kind of peaceful scene of a ropeway at night, each cab lit up like string lights. This came out pretty much how I was picturing it (as much as I picture anything visually).

I really like the idea that the rural towns in this setting all have some kind of reliable public transit option - the larger ones (or ones conveniently placed) are linked by high speed rail, and others nearby might link to those (and to eachother) with ropeways. Easier/cheaper to set up over rough terrain, great view, and pretty reliable - you always know there's another car coming.

Going into the city might mean riding the ropeway to the next town (perhaps changing cars/lines at a transfer station, where there's a lodge with bathrooms and perhaps a diner) and then getting on a high speed train. Once in the city, a network of streetcars could get you the rest of the way. Or these might be a fun option for slow travel - hiking from town to town, and if you pull a muscle or it's raining, or you just want to enjoy the view, you hop on a ropeway and watch the mountains go by. Long spans like this would obviously be pretty rare, most ropeways I've seen hug the ground, raised on tall poles, but they make postcards of the really cool looking stuff, so I figure this could be one of those cases.

Found this on an old device. If anyone knows the original artist, please do let me know so I can give credit.

nobonzo.com

I’ve been thinking a lot about how lifestyles, routines, and the overall pace of life might be different in a more solarpunk society. That, combined with some recent discussions and research into solar cookers made me want to try a scene of a solarpunk kitchen.

Specifically, I decided to render a summer kitchen, a fixture of old farmhouses around here, usually slung between the house and the barn, just a place where you could cook without heating up the rest of the house. They fell out of favor as stoves got more efficient, and they're a luxury for people with lots of space, but I think there's value in a spot where we can cook without making air-conditioning fight the oven. Seasonality may play a much bigger role in our lives in a more solarpunk world.

I pictured our summer kitchen as a kind of three-season porch or sunroom, somewhere you could grow herbs in the windows and overwinter less-hearty fruit trees. And maybe as we reconsider cooking around slower processes, in less hectic lives, add some seating for company (conventional wisdom has it that they're gonna hang around your kitchen either way, so we might as well build the space with that in mind). By building one wall mostly out of sliding doors (with bug netting I didn’t bother to show) we can open the space to cool it, and to reduce any risk of humidity building up from the greenhouse part and rotting the house.

There are a few benefits to this design, I think – in addition to cooling, by building the summer kitchen as an outcropping from the house, we add options for north-facing sides to point our south-facing Scheffler reflector at, making it easier to retrofit old houses. And if we have a south wall to work with, we can add a proper greenhouse wall to get the most out of our natural light. And if we’re building an addition anyways, we can add a root cellar underneath, for preserving vegetables and some fruits without the use of electricity. Once I had a basic layout in mind, I turned to the folks on the solarpunk community and included as many of their ideas as I could.

So, features of this kitchen of the future:

Solar oven: I borrowed the design (and the reflector) from Tamara Solar Kitchen. The big dish beside the house uses the curved, parabolic mirrors to concentrate light on a small opening on the firebrick north wall of the summer kitchen. This light bounces off an angled mirror so it enters the oven from underneath, allowing you to bake in the brick oven, or use the cast iron plate set into the top as a stovetop.

Several of these devices exist IRL and work just fine with only manual controls. But I included the computer control panel because I wanted to show that despite some of my other pictures and their emphasis on analog designs, there's a place for technology in a solarpunk society. Modern tech, without the corporate surveillance state, and focus on wasteful extraction, is a huge part of what I think can make solarpunk work. A lot of the older technologies I'm reexamining may benefit from or become viable with better sensors and automation.

For the screens, my head cannon is that they're old, out-of-support tablets, and the co-op that makes these setups flashed them with a custom ROM, essentially turning unsupported, insecureable tablets into secure, single-purpose devices. Making them less generally useful, perhaps, but still extending their service life far beyond what their manufacturer intended. A motoring system that helps you keep track of your mirror and makes sure it’s not cooking the wrong part of your house would be a good thing to have.

Solar hot water: on the roof, another opportunity to use sunlight directly, and to make the most of our south-facing roof.

Pedal-powered appliances: This was a recommendation from the instance which would not have occurred to me, though I’ve used old pedal-powered grindstones before. I built these ones into the bar both because it made for easy access/maintenance, and because I wonder what 'keeping up with the Joneses' looks like in a solarpunk future, I think in any society, no matter what its values are, there will be people who go way out of their way to demonstrate those values, and I could see things like this being used as statements. This is largely remixed from a real thing a design student made, though I modified the pedal system so it would use a step set under the counter, rather than the version that stuck out the side, as I felt like I’d kick that thing whenever I walked past the bar.

Root cellar: another idea from the group, and something the people living here could benefit from all year long. You might notice that the refrigerator is missing. We talked a bit about perhaps modifying a propane-driven camper fridge to run off a solar cooker, but ultimately I decided they probably have one refrigerator, maybe set up like a chest freezer for maximum efficiency, back inside the winter kitchen.

Fermenting kit: another option for preservation and a fun hobby and another idea from the group. They might be making beer, or soy sauce, or any of a bunch of things. Similarly, I included a shoebox tempeh incubator on the counter as well.

As for making the image itself, these more realistic-looking ones take a lot more time as I can’t rely on filters or other stylizations to hide details. But I wanted this one to be detailed. While I was planning this one, I referenced some of the AI art out there of solarpunk kitchens for visuals I liked – the very fancy dark wood, red accent walls, and bright sunlight streaming in were elements I reused here. But one thing I think that sets this apart, besides the ideas I want to demonstrate, is that you can zoom in on this and really look at the bits and pieces, and they hopefully make sense. Someone (me) had to find and cut out all the jars and plants and nicknacks. There’s a reason that they’re there. Hopefully the version of the image you’re seeing still has enough detail to allow you to do that, if not let me know and I’ll find a way to send the high rez version.

I’ll say here that the stained glass windows and the carved wood panels were contributed by a friend’s midjourny bot.

One last note: buildings in a solarpunk world are going to vary drastically based on local conditions. Building in cooperation with our surroundings is one way to really cut our consumption of resources. This kitchen is built for North America because that’s what I know. Other continents, other longitudes, other climates, will call for much different designs. I’d love to see those if anyone can depict them.

And, like the other Postcards from a Solarpunk Future, this image is CC-BY, meaning you can use it for whatever you like. I'm not sure how, in-world, this ended up as a postcard, maybe the homeowners won a contest or made it to the cover of a homesteading zine or something.