Re-imagining the Château du Feÿ Dovecote as a 500-year library & seedbank
This project is regenerating a ruined 16th-century dovecote (colombier) into a 500-year ecological infrastructure to support an agro-ecological renaissance in rural France. Currently under restoration by a team of artists, ecologists, and technologists, this 3-story heritage building is being repurposed as library, seedbank, and makerspace to restart a selective forestry cycle and restore the biodiversity of the surrounding forest and farmlands for present and future generations.
Local
France
Joigny & Villecien, Yonne, Bourgogne, France
Mainly rural
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
As individual(s) in partnership with organisation(s)
First name: Peter Last name: Wells Gender: Male Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: Friends of Fey, Fey Arts Age: 30 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: United States Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Château du Fey Town: Villecien Postal code: 89300 Country: France Direct Tel:+4407789821427 E-mail:peter.morgan.wells@gmail.com Website:https://feytopia.com/
A heritage dovecote (pigeon-raising tower) in the French countryside lies in ruin while the 100-acre broadleaf forest around it languishes and biodiversity declines. The community who stewards it is disconnected from their surrounding ecology and is seeking to rekindle their positive impact in the landscape. We are restoring the dovecote as a library for the local community, seed bank for the surrounding 100 acres, and time capsule for the future. The team have consulted with the creative community who steward this space and codified their aspirations through an artistic lens into a multi-generational infrastructure. The core purpose of this project is to rebuild the technical and social capacity of the community to steward its local ecology over multiple generations. There is the practical aspect of cultivating the skills to do this through seed-banking, selective forestry, carpentry, landscape planning, and agroforestry, which aligns with the cultural aspect of growing the skills for multi-generational planning, re-building rituals to support stewardship practices, vitalising local architectural traditions, and knowledge transfer to inspire similar practices in other locations.
Following its present restoration from ruin, the Château du Feÿ dovecote will become a home for the future knowledge & ecology of Feÿ. Over the next two years, its stone nesting boxes will become a seed bank for the 100 acre forest & the Feÿtopia community will construct library shelves to hold the knowledge of Feÿ Extitute. These will be built with oak timber felled from the forest, milled, dried, planed, & assembled by the community and a corresponding amount of climate resilient hardwood timber will be re-planted, with stones from the dovecote in their roots, to be ready for harvest before the current shelves decay. This process will be repeated three times until in 500 years the Dovecote returns to ruin, when its time capsule will emerge to offer another ecological future.
Heritage Futures
Ecological Infrastructure
Citizen Science
Biodiversity
Forestry
In alignment with UN SDGs 11, 12, and 13, the Fey Dovecote is oriented to restore the biodiversity of the mixed broadleaf forest that surrounds it, initiating a selective forestry plan, and introducing agroforestry systems to the surrounding area.
Seedbanking - The Dovecote is being rebuilt in part as a seedbank to safeguard the existing biodiversity of plants in the surrounding 100-acre forest, adapting the species composition to bolster its resilience to climate shocks over the next several decades. The seed bank will also contribute to improving agricultural practices in the immediate area as the community realises its long-term aspiration of acquiring the adjacent farmland and shifting it beyond its current conventional monocrop rotation, toward a biologically-managed agroforestry + alley cropping system.
Selective Forestry - Constructing the interior of the Dovecote library will require approximately 2.8m³ of raw timber. Rather than sourcing this from a distant supply chain with an immense amount of embodied carbon, we are planning to fell a 150 year oak tree from the surrounding forest and process it over 1-2 years into the needed interior timber. The benefits of taking on this process is that it will grow a highly valuable skill set for many community members which can be transferred to others. It also generates the technical capability for us to apply the same process to other buildings on the site, reducing numerous externalities and channelling resources back into local production. Additionally, it creates a relationship between community members and their ecology, to take responsibility for the death of another living being and to support their legacy by replanting a future elder oak tree to take their place.
Time Capsule - Promoting replication of these practices through a 500-year time capsule carrying reflections from the community to the year 2523AD along with technical information to restore the surrounding ecology/forestry cycle.
The experience we are aiming to create through the Feÿ Dovecote is one of both awe and tactile connection to an inspiring future. As one would walk into a sacred space where the participant is encouraged to touch the walls, to understand how the space was made, and to see the stories written in these materials. From the outside, the Dovecote from the outside, the Dovecote should appear as a 16th-century stone and plaster tower, in keeping with its heritage designation. On the inside, we are aiming for it to feel like a confluence of the Beinecke rare book library at Yale University and the inside of the Interval Bar of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. Acting both a place of reflection as much as a living cabinet of curiosities, with flecks of light cascading down from the pigeon entrances in the eves 8 metres above, and dancing across the hand carved timbers, books, and artworks mirroring the seed diversity in cold storage, and models of generative artworks on the estate. If the array of 16th-century hexafoils (protective spellworks) carved into the walls are any indication, this space was originally built to be one of the hearts of the surrounding landscape and we are eager to continue imbuing it with this same care and depth of significance.
Whilst the experience design of sacred and tactile spaces is often diametrically opposed (think of a cathedral to a childrens’ library, or a modern art gallery to a science museum); we seek to transcend this “glass box” effect and to reinforce that the motion that an inspiring future for this unique place is not of only accessible, but achievable. We will consider the Feÿ Dovecote a success if its visitors can trace the journey of an acorn in the archive to a timber post in the structure, and to imagine themselves as an actor in that process of stewardship and craft.
This project is unique, in that it has emerged from a purpose-led community of practice rather than a neighbourhood or a township. Indeed, it is building on the best practices of similar communities across the EU who are experimenting with applying new purposes and ownership models to heritage estates and does not claim to have all of the answers to these challenges. This being said, it is actively expanding a profound field of knowledge and practice, equipping a myriad of people to participate toward restoring vibrant communities out of a disconnected and individual urban fabric.
Historically, dovecotes have held an imposing position in the French agricultural landscape. Available only to wealthy and powerful landowners by royal decree, many people viewed them as an embodiment of feudal exploitation and the impact of the doves on their grain harvests was a further insult to oppression, resulting in all dovecotes being outlawed by the Third Estate after the revolution of 1789. This project is an initial step beyond this history. In its previous life, this building and its multi-species relationship ingested the biodiversity of the surrounding ecology; yet in this era, it is being reoriented to restore this biodiversity through a living seed collection, stewarded for future generations. In tandem with this is a library, an open collection of data and written knowledge to inform seed preservation, agroforestry practice, and mixed broad-leaf forest management in advance of climatic shifts and potential oak die-offs in the region which will impact the surrounding economy. We anticipate that our stewardship practices in selective forestry, and mixed agroforestry cropping systems in conversation with Schumacher College trial sites in the UK will be valuable systems for farmers in the Yonne river micro-climate over the coming decades.
Over the last five years, the current stewards of the Feÿ estate have been reorienting this heritage site as a beacon for culture and ecology in the local community. This conversation has unfolded through relationships with local communities and businesses alike as well as the annual Feÿ Arts festival which draws 1500 attendees in September and is free to locals. A cluster of environmentally focused organisations have emerged as a result of these efforts and the town of Joigny is rapidly becoming a hot spot for ecological innovations in the region.
This phase of the Dovecote project is intentionally set with a small area of engagement. This is partially a circumstance of the location, being in a highly rural area which has experienced depopulation and partially due to the experimental nature of the project. This being said, there are strong existing relationships with community projects such as La Casa Bascule ecological community, Renaissance Joigny, and the local mayor's office. The Château du Feÿ and it's seasonal intentional community Feÿtopia, draw a wide range of local, regional, and international visitors to the area and is a nexus for cross pollination between urban and rural communities working on climate adaption, existential risks, and blockchain technologies. Over the next several years, we anticipate the practices from this heritage future project will create a visible ripple of long-term visioning for similar communities internationally.
This work builds on a vibrant diversity of skills reflected in its stakeholders. Personally, I am approaching this work from professional backgrounds in permaculture design, ecological arts, anthropology, and community development. The other core team members have brought invaluable knowledge and skills in architecture, heritage studies, conservation biology, seed banking, open science, media archaeology, project management, and local history & politics. Much of the vision of the project has been woven together from in-depth interviews with the community members and staff of the chateau, and projecting future uses of the site in 500 years.
This ongoing project is exceptionally unique in several dimensions of its timescale, trans-disciplinary vision, and its technological innovations. In the first instance, the work is unfolding on a 500-year timescale. As a pronounced step away from the short term-ism has contributed to our present social & ecological crises, a 500-year design/practice compels our team and community to act beyond their own personal benefit and re-orient themselves in an ecological time, as previous generations applied to constructing cathedrals, or as some Iwi (tribes) like Wakatū have done in New Zealand, creating their own 500-year resource management plans. This long-term planning is being enforced in the installation of a time capsule set to be opened in the year 2523AD, which will carry messages written by present community members to that time, as well as technical information to continue stewarding the forest & reconstructing the Dovecote. Whether or not these ecological stewardship practices will survive for 20 generations is not the intent as much as the creating the culture and technical conditions for this success. Even if the Dovecote returns to its present state of repose as a ruin, we will still consider it as a success.
To meet the challenge of delivering on a multi-generational vision, this work calls for intentionally re-integrating practices and epistemologies from the arts, natural sciences, architecture, and technology. Technologically, the Dovecote acts as a living library for data generated by open source science projects in progress in the Feÿtopia research community. In the first two years, this data-pool will include the biodiversity surveys, meteorological data, and seed catalogue of the site, but in the long term, it will be used as a knowledge hub for similar ecological transformations of heritage sites in Europe.
Similar to the EU Horizon-funded unMonastery project, this community is exploring how to apply a heritage futures lens to transform existing heritage ruins into ecological infrastructures for the future. As a new synthesis of practices in heritage management, ecological restoration, communal living, & technological systems, this is a unique experiment for imbuing our patrimony with new purpose. The ecological vision around the Feÿ community has already echoed to other communities and similar projects in France, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Dovetailing with my own work in arts organisation, this particular project is testing a range of tactics for incorporating artists as a fulcrum in other critical landscape-scale regeneration projects over the next decade, through the rejuvenation of heritage sites and their respective biomes. Within the next three years, some of these practices may be applied directly on the Dartington estate in Devon, UK, as well as in the AlVelAl landscape regeneration project in Andalucia, Spain, and similar sites participating in the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.
One of these technological processes is to apply a new function of NFT artworks as a living metric of its ecological health. This digital token, shared across stakeholders and community members, is a replica of the Dovecote which will adapt and change its appearance depending on the health of the forest. This is an application for marrying the value of blockchain based items to local ecologies to further anchor an otherwise ethereal resource ecosystem to the well-being of people & place.
As this proposal has alluded to earlier, this project is focused on reimaging solutions for the overlapping crises of climate & ecology, place-based stewardship, heritage management, and cultural sustainability. To reverse the tides of degradation in both working landscapes and heritage assets, as well as rural depopulation, estates like the Château du Feÿ hold a unique potential to regenerate the biodiversity and fertility of their surrounding landscapes, while alleviating the burden of similar unoccupied listed-heritage assets on regional, national, and international bodies through new site stewardship models. These stewardship and community structures bring new life and interest to depopulated areas, helping to bridge the urban/rural divide through a shared purpose of honouring and rejuvenating local heritage sites.
Like any long-term solution in the ecological crisis, this project does not purport to being an infinitely-scalable panacea, but is one coherent piece within a mosaic of local solutions unfolding around the world. Its scope is to deliver a specific, tangible impact that propagates a perspective of multi-generational planning in aligned projects around Europe.
