07.21.2025
Benton Park West Tiny House, St. Louis, MO
Conversation with Danya Gerasimova and Ava Richards

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Tiggs and Rikki lead the Benton Park West Tiny House Project, an experiment in sustainable architecture, landscape design, and community building inspired in part by Bob Cassilly's adaptive reuse.

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Danya:

Can you guys talk a little about your background prior to this project?

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Tiggs:

I have been in the crafts since I was a kid in grade school. Back then, we still had specialty classes like woodworking and metalsmithing. Or you had home economics, so you learned how to cook and sew some clothes up. You'd learn a degree of self-reliance back then. I utilized those skills to put myself through college and get my degree in Art and Design at Maryville University. There I started to learn the iconography, the graphic ideologies behind what we look at and use in our lives. I became a craftsperson. We own the property across the street, where I work in the fabrication studio and live upstairs. I also did an extensive amount of traveling using my craft, working in the Caribbean Film Union as a prop maker. And that actually stemmed from a project that I got to engage in at Cementland.

Around 2007–2010, a guy was filming a movie in Cementland, and I responded to his ad as a production assistant. Within a couple of days, they put me in charge of the prop making division. The film was called Jim. You can look it up online. It's a future dystopic movie about a clone becoming sentient and fighting against the system. The producer’s name is Jeremy Morris; I think he was from St. Louis and moved to New York. He got the money to put together a Sundance film, and he came back to St. Louis to film at City Museum and Cementland as two location points. That interaction with Cementland showed me ways to articulate, transpose, and alchemize materials into new forms.

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From there, I went on to live in Seattle working as a designer and fabricator at a studio that handled trade show booths and restaurants. Then I moved to Puerto Rico and worked in the Caribbean Film Union. I worked on The Rum Diary, the Johnny Depp movie based on the Hunter S. Thompson novel. I came back here and then went back again, living in Puerto Rico for a while during Hurricane Maria. I worked with the Earthship Academy: Michael Reynolds out of Arizona doing sustainable design out of tires, bottles, and things like that. So these ideologies built up for a while.

I went down to architecture school at University of Memphis and studied for my Master's in Architecture. Then I came back to St. Louis, utilizing this knowledge and seeing a need for a sustainable, resilient housing approach, as well as a green space. That has developed to create what Le Corbusier calls "a machine for living." That's really the inspiration for all of this: can we create an environment that is giving back and isn't consuming to the degree that most of our environments do?

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Danya:

Are you from St. Louis?

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Tiggs:

Yeah, sure. I've been here 20 something years. I don't know what the resident requirements are.

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Rikki:

I've been bouncing around all over the place. Here is home now. I've worked on different organic farms in the past in Austin, Buffalo, and California. My dream is to have something small, with permaculture and edibles, so we can produce our own food and food for our neighbors. 

Another big piece of our project has been community engagement. Every Thursday we host a food share event. We get food from Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and Costco. They'll throw away a whole bag of apples when just one of the apples is bad. We take that bag of apples, compost the bad one, and share the rest with our community. It's just a dream!

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Danya:

Rikki, can you expand a little more on what permaculture is and what it means to design with permaculture in mind?

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Rikki:

You want a hierarchy of plants. We have a mix of medicinal herbs and a lot of fruit trees and bushes: figs, plums, serviceberries, grapes. We had an apple tree that went down in the tornado. We have elderberry, rosemary, oregano—all kinds of stuff. It's really cool to see their balance with each other. The crabgrass has been really aggressive, and that's been a challenge in one section. Then the yarrow came back super strong the next year, and now I have all this beautiful yarrow that we can use for tea and medicine, and the pollinators love it. It's beautiful. 

The garden also works with the orientation of the house. The house is on the north side, and the garden is on the south side, where there is the most sun.

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Tiggs:

So that's another aspect to the hierarchy of permaculture. Our larger trees sit closer to the house, and as they grow, the plums and the serviceberries are going to create shade and passive cooling for the house. And when they shed those leaves, we can get solar gain.

Following the hierarchy of the trees, from the plums and the apple tree that used to be there, we go down to our lower liners, the smaller serviceberry trees. And then from the trees we go to the bushes, our figs, and then to those elderberries, the low lying bushes. And then down below that, you're going to find the lowest lying herbs, like the yarrow. So you create a tier effect as that array of mostly native plants goes out to the solar south of the house, creating an all around more sustainable design for the project. It’s integrated into the architecture of the house: the permaculture is also the structure.

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Danya:

Does permaculture become more hands off and sustainable down the line too?

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Rikki:

That's the goal. Right now, it's very labor intensive. As you can see, we've been gone for two weeks, and the weeds have completely taken over.

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Danya:

Is there a politics or a set of commitments informing your project?

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Tiggs:

For me, it addresses several things socially. One is just personal sovereignty, creating an environment you set the parameters around. That can be challenging in some regards. For example, I want to keep the structure contextual to the neighborhood. I'm not trying to build something so outrageous that the local municipality or our neighbors are like, "Oh no." So there's a degree to which it's socially informed too.

But the idea of the program itself is to bring our community an awareness of specialities and modalities for understanding disappearing utilities, as well as the environment they are disappearing in, under an ever increasing demand on resources. Utilizing reused materials is not just about the material, but how it's been used in the past and how it's being used now. Looking at its carbon footprint is a big deal. Is there going to be built in resiliency in this room instead of creating trash?

Learning how to lay brick, woodworking, or the Japanese technique of preserving burnt wood that we did on all our exterior trim work—normally people would have to pay crazy amounts of money in order to obtain those materials and the skillset to implement those materials. All of that keeps basics like food, shelter, and security out of reach for most people. And if you look at this project, it's got food, it's got shelter, and the community is that security. And we are now creating equitable mobility for future generations, like our kids or other individuals, because we haven't overinflated the value of our environment. We haven't commoditized it. So there are a lot of different things about this project that address current social issues.

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Rikki:

The materials have been a huge part of the project. The project has shaped itself based on what materials are available. For example, the tin ceiling that's going to go in the kitchen is from a building down the street. The wood all around the house is from a warehouse in Festus. They had a thousand bookcases—first come, first served. We spent all weekend busting down these bookcases, and now we have all this wood that we've been able to use. And what would we have done instead? I don't know.

Tiggs is so creative with reuse, and we are able to work with what we have. For years, we didn't know what we were going to do for the flooring on the balcony. And then a friend called saying that she was driving through a university parking lot and saw a bunch of solid wood desks in the dumpster. So we got up super early the next morning, busted down all these desks, Tiggs cut them to size and beveled them, and I screwed them in place. Now we have a beautiful hardwood floor.

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Tiggs:

And we are not on a time crunch. In my experience, a lot of people trying to build something are on a time crunch. You got money, time, or quality—you gotta pick one. We haven't set time parameters, so when the right design solution comes about, we have the freedom to implement that design solution, which is more efficient and contextual to our needs.

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Ava:

That's really interesting. I feel like the normal building process is, "We have this need. Let's go out and find something." It sounds like you guys are intentionally finding materials first and then figuring out how to incorporate them into your plan.

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Tiggs:

I think we got to the point where we can't take any more stuff. But it gave us a really cool open palette of media. It's like Photoshop, where you can just pull patterns and blend them in. So when you look around the exterior of the house, you see a granite facade blend into a brick facade that blends into a Hardie Backer or wood facade. But they all share the same form through that fluid shift.

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Rikki:

Sometimes, we are just sitting on materials, which feels crazy. We go out and spend all this time gathering materials that we don’t have a plan for, and then we need to find a place to store them. And it's like, "Oh, this is taking up space. Are we ever going to need it?" And then all of a sudden, there is a problem or a need—and whoa! We have that one thing from two years ago that would be perfect right here. 

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Tiggs:

Rikki's mom passed in November and left us a house in the Ozarks. It didn't get winterized properly, and a pipe busted and flooded two thirds of the house: two bathrooms, bedroom, living room, the whole kitchen, dining room. The walls were saturated two feet up. We went in, tore it all out, and put it back together over the last two and a half months. And it cost us about $15, because we had collected so much drywall and we had tile galore.

We are also not fixated on an archetype. A lot of the time when people want to do a kitchen, they go to Home Depot or Lowe's to look at these archetypes that they can pick out and use. Everybody ends up with the same faux finished kitchen with the same granite. There is no room for creativity. But with this project, we get to explore. What could we do with this material?

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Rikki:

The Community Build Days have been really great for that. Like you said, the usual method when you have a project is you go to Home Depot and buy X, Y, Z materials. But when we have people come in for our Build Days, it exposes them to a different way of thinking about materials and what they have. Maybe I don't need to go out and buy all new things. Maybe I can use what I have.

And when we do the mosaic studios, that's really fun too. You can make mosaics out of anything. A lady messaged us once, "I broke a dinner plate. Can I donate it to you guys?" Yeah, you could. But it sounds like you have really awesome materials for mosaics.

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Danya:

Can you guys expand a little on what sovereignty means to you and how it manifests? I think I heard you talk about food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, and aesthetic sovereignty.

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Tiggs:

Energy for sure. There is no AC in here. But even though it's 90+ degrees outside, it's not terribly hot inside. We don't even have an HVAC system. But if we open the door in the loft, it will create a convection loop in the house that will passively cool the house. We are trying to build some resilience. I've watched the electric, water, and sewer bills increase not by 5% or 10%, but by 80% to 90% over the last 10 years.

20 years ago, I bought my place across the street for $50,000, and my taxes were $300 a year. My taxes increased every year, and after 20 years, they were $900 a year. So that adds about 20% [to the purchasing price of $50,000]. And then I get a thing in the mail saying it's going to go up 300%. Whoa!

A lot of people buy a house and think it's worth the money. But they don't realize it's really not if they are paying so much on top of it. What does that look like in 20 more years, when I’m out of the working age? I'm 44 now, and in 20 years I'll be 64. And what, I gotta go get a part-time job now to pay my taxes? This project allowed us to come into the market with our own equity, to invest it and capitalize on it instead of trying to get into a retail market. That financial sovereignty is really important.

We have access to upcycled materials. We got the land for relatively cheap through the Land Revitalization Authority (LRA). Even most of our plants are donated transplants from other people's gardens. We are not going out and buying plants; we're cloning plants that we have.

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Rikki:

And saving seeds.

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Tiggs:

And then the liberty in the design has been a lot of fun, because we are not pigeonholed into what's kitsch right now. We can take a risk and see what we can come up with.

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Danya:

In your project statement and interviews, you've mentioned that you are inspired by Bob Cassilly. How do his aesthetics inform your work?

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Tiggs:

In art school, they told us to learn from the masters. At the same time, when you look at the evolution of art, movements like Dada took the approach of rejecting the status quo. Being at Cementland for the first time, you see both. You see a castle put together with cobblestone—whoa! But it's also an homage to classicism.

You see a lot of that in City Museum too. There's a very liberal, modern approach to aesthetics, but there's also an homage to classicism. Taking the old friezes and putting them up as an aesthetic element, but also as an architectural component to divide or create space. For example, the granite mosaic work you see in City Museum, like the dragonflies metamorphing as you're going up the stairs, is a really cool use of that material. But the material being used also builds resilience to the high traffic of that space. That innovative reuse of materials was really inspiring.

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Danya:

Did you interact with Bob Cassilly while you were at Cementland working on that Jim movie?

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Tiggs:

If Bob was here, he would of course tell you he doesn't remember me. But one day as I was working on the set for the movie, I had to go out to the big building where they have all the mixing stalls. We had all the generators for powering different lighting equipment on one half of that building. I walk in to grab a tool or something, and Bob comes in and just starts going off on me. He's like, "What the hell's going on here? I'm here on vacation!" Which is really cool. This guy is just sitting out here in his playground; it's a big playground for this guy. And he's like, "It's too loud here, turn this shit off now." I'm like, "Oh man, I gotta go get the production manager."

Around that time, this group had floated a couple of barges down the river to Missouri, and one of them sank. And the Coast Guard was like, "You gotta stop this shit right now." So they shut it down, and there are like a hundred hippies going, "What do we do?" Bob let them stay at Cementland for a few days while they figured this stuff out. Meanwhile, we were working on this movie, and they needed some extras to fill the scenes. So the director of the movie was like, "I'll pay you guys 10 bucks and a sandwich to put on these white jumpsuits so you all look like clones." 

That was my experience meeting Bob, interacting with that environment, and seeing what he was seeing: "This is a cool place to realize my imagination, experiment with and test the limits of design materials, and then open that up to people." You see that with City Museum too, and I think Cementland was going to be the next step.

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Ava:

How long were you there filming?

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Tiggs:

It might've been like two or three weeks. Shortly after, they called me back and asked me to go out to New York to rebuild several of the sets. I rebuilt that cave from City Museum so they could reshoot it for the movie.

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Danya:

Did you interact with Bob Cassilly's work while living in St. Louis prior to that shoot? Or was that your first introduction?

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Tiggs:

No, not really. But that was almost 20 years ago—I was a baby. I haven't interacted with Cementland in 20 years. We used to do Airbnb, and we used to send people there if they wanted to see something cool. Like, "You might get a $50 ticket, but it's worth it." Every time they came back, they would say it was worth it. Some people did get tickets.

Bob from Cassilly's crew lives right up the street, so we interact now and again. We go to his place, where he's building Harleys and cars. This area is very, very artistic. Beckemeier Planing Mill is not too far up the street. These guys can match any type of historic architectural moulding, and they build other stuff too. One time, some guys came in there with a bunch of Leonardo DaVinci's drawings and were like, "Can you make some of these things?" They didn't quite get around to all of it, so they asked if I wanted to do it. I was like, sure! Next thing I know, I'm building 22 foot Leonardo DaVinci air gliders and a couple of bicycles he designed for stage plays. Doing some of those crossover modalities and artisanal approaches to design solutions is really cool within this community.

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Danya:

Rikki, do you relate to Bob Cassilly's work in some way?

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Rikki:

I just love the creative reuse of materials. You go to City Museum and there are so many details everywhere that you can hone in on. We are fortunate to be able to capture a little bit of that here with the tile work and the mosaic on the front. If you look at old buildings, there is a big focus on small details. Old buildings in St. Louis have these little designs, and we don't really see that in new builds. It's cool to have the time and skills to do that here.

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Tiggs:

You see the hand of the craftsman too. You go somewhere like St. Charles, and it's just ticky-tacky boxes all on the road. When you look at architecture here, you see variation, but you also see the hand of the artist in each of these buildings, whether it be a conch shell set over the top of the pediment or the way they articulate the framing of a window. That is an ancestral art, an ancestral craft here. And I think that's something you see observed in Cassilly's approach.

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Danya:

I feel like a big part of Cassilly's aesthetic is the enormity of scale. You guys seem to be taking the opposite approach to scale with your tiny house.

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Tiggs:

Actually, I personally see an interplay of the micro and the macro in Cassilly’s work. For example, you'll see a large mosaic, like the dragonflies at City Museum. On the micro level, you have little broken pieces of granite making up a single dragonfly. And that one dragonfly is in its metamorphosis, adding up to the larger composition. And it's in the Fibonacci sequence. So there's this layering: the material used, the context of the composition it creates, and then how it fits and blends into a larger composition on the macro scale.

If you look at our facade, we have small broken up pieces of granite creating a larger pattern. To me, it looks like wood grain or the galaxy as it spirals out. That's the kind of thing I'm trying to pick up from Cassilly: how I can integrate that micro/macro status of the materials and the interplay between their aesthetics.

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Danya:

What's the overall significance of scale in your project?

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Tiggs:

We call it a tiny house, and people are like, "Well, it's not that tiny." But within the context of our need and where it sits, it is very tiny. The house has a footprint of 420 sq ft. It's not very big. Every building around here is 2,000 to 4,000 sq ft on average, huge. But if you look at those other buildings, they have very small green spaces. Big footprint, small green space. We inverted that: we have a large green space and a very small footprint. So that's one way we're playing with scale in the context of our neighbors. And with 420 sq ft, we're paying the cheapest taxes in the neighborhood, so we are thinking about that social context too.

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Danya:

When I hear "tiny house," my first association is the 2010s tiny house movement, mobile homes. How do you guys relate to that scene?

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Tiggs:

I was reading a sustainable green design book that gave the definition that I am more aligned with: a tiny house has the minimum square footage needed to maintain that space through security, shelter, and sustenance. In the 2010s, I feel that it was a way for individuals to have a socioeconomic approach to the increasing demands of living in our system. But I wouldn't say that they were sustainable or resilient approaches.

Mobile homes take a lot of gas, carbon. And land is not cheap. It's expensive to park somewhere, because usually you don't own the land you park on. And there are other aspects. People are like, "I'm going to build a tiny house out in nature and be off the grid." That's great, but most of these individuals are very dependent on the grid. They wouldn't survive a winter out in the wilderness because of our dependence on technology and on the logistics chain for food. I think the 2010s was an attempt at breaking from the system, but still utilizing mechanisms of the system to do it. And I don't think that was a very long-term investment.

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Danya:

Rikki, you mentioned you've moved around quite a bit and worked on different agricultural projects. What has it been like for you to transition to a project that's intentionally so long-term, stationary, and embedded in this community?

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Rikki:

Yeah, I think that's a huge part of the project: it's not just about the house being small; it's about the community that we're bringing around it. We've met so many amazing people through our Community Build Days, and the people who show up have all kinds of different skill levels. There was a woman who had never used a hand drill before, so Tiggs taught her how to do it. And then she put in every single screw in the decking of the house. And that is so cool. Every time I look at any aspect of the house, I can think about all the different people whose hands were on it and who contributed to this project. It's so much love. And that's because it is where it is, and because of the people we've invited to come and join.

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Tiggs:

We've also got to pay tribute to the artists who were part of this project. Our friend Chelsea in Buffalo put together the stained glass. She sent Rikki all these samples of glass you can buy, and I was like, "What do you mean buy glass? Doesn't she have a box of glass lying somewhere?" She was like, “Oh yeah.” So we are getting other artists out of the mindset of going to the store and buying a bunch of materials. Instead ask, “What do I have here?”

When you go on the deck on the second story, you'll see the handrail. That handrail together with the columns that run all the way down to the foundation was a huge engineering product for this project, which under normal circumstances would've made it impossible to do. But I had an artist buddy who was a welder, so I could make it possible. [St. Louis mosaics artist] Lu Ray came in, and we had her run the mosaic studio for the front. So there have been other artists that have come in and put their energy and spirit into the project.

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Danya:

Are you guys familiar with Bob Cassilly's work before City Museum, when he was rehabbing houses as part of the architectural salvage movement on the South Side in the ‘70s and ‘80s?

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Tiggs:

A little bit, yeah. Was Tim Tucker part of that?

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Danya:

Yep, exactly. Do you see any parallels or relate in any way to that period of neighborhood driven DIY architectural preservation work?

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Tiggs:

I think it's very niche right now, to be honest. There's not a lot of people doing it. There are a couple of guys that collect architectural stuff, but they're just selling it, commoditizing it. I have noticed this approach to recycling and preserving getting out of reach for people like me, because it's being commoditized. You go to Refab, and there's a six panel door that would've been thrown in the alley that's now $75.

Or even bricks. There are bricks lying in the streets, alleys, and yards all over this city. But St. Louis is one of the largest exporters of bricks in the country. And to buy bricks is crazy! It pulls them out of reach, and now I have to scavenge for what I used to find in abundance.

In the 2010s, everybody was using pallet wood, and there was a huge surge of recycled materials. But then what did you see really quickly? Home Depot counterbalanced the whole movement by putting out a vinyl faux wood pallet material. It's interesting how this movement keeps becoming commoditized even though it's a rejection of commoditization, in my opinion.

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Danya:

Can you talk about the history of this lot you are building on?

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Tiggs:

Before I bought this place, I lived across the street, and there used to be a large six family on this lot. It looked just like the adjacent place, a massive two story building. This lot is close to 7,000 sq ft, and that building was about 6,000 sq ft. The lady who lived in the building owned it. She passed away, and her children went back and forth over it, and then it just fell in disrepair. It caught on fire numerous times. In 2011, it finally just completely burned to the ground.

The standard approach to remediation is not very environmentally friendly even now. They just dig a big hole, throw the building in there, and cover it up rather than remediate the materials in an environmentally safe way. But one of my neighbors just came and planted a garden there. He put some eggplants and tomatoes in there and then just walked away. I thought it was a waste of energy, so I started tending that garden. The next year, I met a guy who taught me how to grow some things... And the next year, we had a thousand heads of garlic and some Gentleman corn. Every year, we were shifting it, changing it, and building the soil.

Then they came out with the Land Lease program. So I went and got a lease for the property.

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Danya:

Can you explain what the Land Lease program was?

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Tiggs:

The Land Lease was a shenanigans program. It was supposed to lease out some of the properties acquired by the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA), which raised one of the largest land banks in the country. It's a little crazy. At the time, they had something close to 20,000 properties in their bank. They acquired most of their properties from people who didn’t pay their taxes. If you don't pay your taxes in three years, the city takes your stuff and gives you a bunch of fees and fines so you don't want to come back for it.

So we got it through that program. I just started building soil, and I didn't have much of a plan to do anything on it. Then after architecture school, I started thinking about this project, but it was more along that lines of an earthship, a micro adaptation of Buckminster Fuller's Spaceship Earth. I started putting some designs together. I wanted to implement the beginnings of this idea and later expand it to create an intentional community. But when I approached Marine Villa and Cherokee with Carol Spencer as alderman, I quickly saw that the social and political context informs what you can do. The response was that they wanted to hold out and get something more profitable in terms of tax revenue.

Then COVID hit and blew up everything. I decided I was going to take my sailboat and go sail the world. I put everything on the market in 2020 and got on a sailboat. Then I met this beautiful gal and decided to come here and collectively put down roots.

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Ava:

Where did you all meet?

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Rikki:

Here on Cherokee.

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Tiggs:

We sailed 1600 miles from Alton to New Orleans on the Mississippi River over a two month period. And when we got there, we decided to come back and do some cool shit. That's where we are now.

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Danya:

Rikki, when did you start planning the garden and tending to it?

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Rikki:

Not until we purchased the lot from the LRA. We did start some things before, like planting the grapes. But once we actually purchased the lot in 2021, we didn't get approval to start building until the fall of 2022. So while we were waiting to get our building permit approved, we started building out the garden spaces and garden beds, and that was really fun. A friend of mine came over, and he was like, "You guys are the only people I know who put in the landscaping first."

It's been cool to see how the gardens have organically shaped themselves based on what was available. And putting in the trees was fun. We were just thinking about where the house would be, and then planning where to put the trees accordingly. People would come over and describe the whole space as a vacant lot. And we'd be like, "The house is going to go here, and there's going to be a whole flower garden there, and there are going to be native flowers here, and this tree is going there." Meanwhile, it's just a pile of rocks and dirt.

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Danya:

Tiggs mentioned that the remediation procedures implemented on this lot weren't environmentally friendly. Did you have to do any sort of soil testing before rolling out such a big gardening project?

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Rikki:

We were using all raised beds for the vegetables.

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Tiggs:

And then most of the non-edible stuff is lower lying. But we did put in activated charcoal pits filled with compost and topsoil to build actual soil on top of what was there. And during the excavation process, we reutilized a lot of the stuff that we dug out of the hole. Most of the stonework is from the old footing of the house. We even compost shrubbery. Not a lot leaves this property. If we can't use it in a structure or as carbon filters, then it goes in the wood burning stove across the street to keep us warm. The goal is to be net zero at the end of the day. Or negative, because we are producing extra energy and food.

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Ava:

When I hear you guys talk about starting with the land first and building from there, as well as what you said about sovereignty earlier, it brings to mind Indigenous wisdom. Is that something that you thought about as you've been working on this project?

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Tiggs:

Oh, absolutely. I've been fascinated by the Plains Indians and the way that they interacted with the land. They would tell you they were stewards of the land. They weren't like, "Manifest destiny—God put me here to preside over everything." It was like, "We are all one and one is all."

We also think about how those individuals interacted with the land through the seasons. A lot of people eat healthy, but they don't eat seasonally. What does it mean to eat seasonally? That changes your whole diet. You shouldn't have bananas in November. You shouldn't have bananas at all in Missouri. When we are planting plants, we think, "Is this thing going to handle this climate region? Is it going to be resilient to the pests?" That's what the ancients were attuned to. We're not even in the know of it at this day and age.

It's really interesting to look at their housing models. Back then, the Plains Indians would build straw huts in the spring, use them throughout the fall, and then leave them to follow the game. There wasn't this idea of ownership in the way that we see it. When the herds would come back after the winter, they would throw some new hay on top of that house and call it good. That's resiliency and sustainability.

Same here: when we apply materials, we're thinking about resiliency and sustainability. I'm not going to put in something that's not going to break down and give itself back. We're not going to put down black tar paper or landscaping screen because we know it's going to break down into microplastics over decades, and that's not going to be good for anybody. We are thinking about the terroir, the essence of the earth, the spirituality of the space that we reside in.

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Rikki:

A lot of times we think there is nature and then there is us, but really we are part of nature. That's easy to see in this space, because the garden is so incorporated into the house. The outside space is part of the living space. The inside space is so small, but it doesn't feel small because there is a whole playground out there.

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Ava:

Some of the people Danya has talked to shared that Bob Cassilly and his team were planting a lot of trees and native plants at Cementland. When you were spending time at Cementland, did you notice the intentional landscaping out there?

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Tiggs:

No. I was 22–23, and it took a long journey to inform where I'm at now. Bob was in his 50s or 60s at that point, so he's been through that journey already. I think that interaction sparked my own journey towards thinking about agriculture and stuff. But at the time, I don't think I noticed that.

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Ava:

Cementland is completely overgrown right now, and there are a lot of native plants.

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Tiggs:

As it should be. Native plants will create a hierarchy. Here, our sunchokes are fickle little guys. They're very exclusive. They want to stick together. But the wild carrot is just like, "Hey, I don't care. I'll encroach on everything." And then you'll see some things that are little loners, like the sunflowers. Watching the plants migrate and evolve has been really cool. Some don't make it.

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Danya:

I saw on your Instagram that you are affiliated with Midwest Artist Project Services (MAPS). Did MAPS help you purchase the lot?

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Rikki:

No, MAPS is our fiscal sponsor. And they were not our fiscal sponsor at the time.

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Danya:

So that was just a purely self-funded purchase?

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Rikki:

Yeah. MAPS itself doesn't provide funding, but they provide a 501(c)(3). So now we are able to apply for grants through MAPS. 

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Tiggs:

Honestly, the project is 99% self-funded. Rikki works and pulls the money in, and I do all the implementation: finding materials and building. But I work too.

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Rikki:

And I do building stuff too.

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Tiggs:

Yeah, we both do. I took on a project in Mississippi, and that guy made a donation to MAPS so we don't have to pay taxes. And then I ordered a solar system for the whole place. So we are utilizing that 501(c)(3) to cut down the cost factor when we do have to buy shit. Or if we have to pay people every once in a while, MAPS will allocate payments from us to them and handle all the accounting, so we don't have to worry about sending them 1099s and all that bullshit.

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Danya:

How expensive has the project been so far?

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Tiggs:

I don't think it's been expensive for what we are getting.

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Rikki:

We are getting so many of our materials for free, and then Tiggs is our labor.

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Tiggs:

We have probably put $70,000 to $80,000 into this project including land and everything. The land was only like $7,000, which is insane. You are not getting land that cheap anywhere in the country, unless you're out in freaking Utah or something. The infrastructure was a big thing. Those 2010s tiny homes usually didn't have the base infrastructure like sewer, water, electric, and trash. That stuff is expensive and it has a residual. You gotta pay that bill increasingly every year. With our project, it was about $9,000–$10,000 to do the sewer and water.

Concrete was our second most expensive material, another $7,000–$10,000. And then rock—geez, rock was expensive. The whole house has 5–10 feet of gravel around it. Most of the houses that burned in the LA fires did not have a non-combustible area like that around them. But that material was expensive.

The solar system was about another $10,000. That takes us up to about $40,000. Then there are little things like electrical panels and wiring, stuff you just can’t get out of the trash. For example, you gotta buy screws. We spent more money per screw than anything. When somebody drops one, we’re like, "Pick that up."

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Danya:

How do you expect the property value to shake up after this investment?

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Tiggs:

Well, gentrification got me on that. I don't have to worry about that with taxes going up by triple every other year. But I know that we will get our value out of it, because we have no intentions of monetizing it. The objective of this project is to live virtually free and piss the system off because they can't tax us.

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Danya:

You talked about the communal aspects of the project earlier. How did you originally approach the Benton Park West community?

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Rikki:

There has to already be community buy-in even just to purchase a lot from the LRA. You can't just go down to the LRA office and say, "I want to buy that one." You have to get approval from the Board of Aldermen and the Neighborhood Association.

Then, before there was even anything on the lot, we did our very first Build Day. We made that circle planter out front from glass bottles. It was part of Perennial's SustainaCrawl, where people could stop at a bunch of businesses and local organizations. So people were coming all day long, and it was a really cool opportunity to explain the project to a lot of people.

When we finally got our approval, we had a groundbreaking party, so we invited everyone in the neighborhood to come. We had little brochures describing the project, what was coming, how they could find out more information, and how to get involved going forward.

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Tiggs:

Anytime we have an abundance of resources to share, it builds communal equity. The Transgender Memorial Garden was Scott McIntosh's project when he was the Neighborhood Association president, before we even started construction. At the time, I had a large excavator and unlimited mulch, so the whole base of the Transgender Memorial Garden was built up with that equipment and material. Three or four years later, I told Scott I wanted to do this project, and he was like, "You got my vote." Dan Gunther was our Alderman at the time. I've known Dan for as long as I've been here, and he's been here a little longer than me. I shared the vision of the project with him and he really supported it, so he gave me his signature.

We had to make these connections and create relationships before we even tried to apply for a building permit. The application process was a little chaotic. We got a cease and desist order weeks after we got our building permit, because they shifted management of the LRA after the mayoral election and changed the rules. We were like, "You already got our money!" But we worked it out.

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Danya:

What are some organizations or groups in St. Louis that you have been partnering and developing relationships with?

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Rikki:

We've worked with Perennial and Benton Park West Neighborhood Association. We also work with Missouri Botanical Garden's Outdoor Youth Corps, a workforce development program for youth in St. Louis. They do job skills training, and they go on site to do all kinds of cool stuff like honeysuckle remediation or visits to urban farms. They've come here four times. It's all young people, and it's really fun showing them the project and talking about our goals, because they are so open-minded and have great questions.

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Tiggs:

WashU brings student groups to tour. They go through different aspects of the project and how students could apply them to their careers. It's been cool to see different groups inquire, explore, and try to extract some kind of value.

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Danya:

Do you guys partner with any builders or farmers on the North Side?

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Tiggs:

Not yet. Between our two kids and managing our four properties, it's honestly really hard to get out of our bubble. But our food share tries to integrate and partner along those lines more.

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Rikki:

We partner with All Hands on Deck for the food share. They host five food share events a week all over different parts of the city, and we are one of them on Thursdays.

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Danya:

Do you contribute some of your harvests to the food share too?

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Tiggs:

One of the underlying aspects of our project is a barter based economy, so we actually trade a lot. For example, I gave a bunch of mulberry logs to a buddy up the street who inoculated them with oyster mushrooms, and he gives us fresh eggs every week in exchange. If we have an overabundance of something, we'll put it out for the food share. But for the most part, we utilize everything here in some capacity.

I also do Rotary Club, and there's a cafe that we are working with in Ferguson right now to supply them with countertops and wood applications for their exterior. One of the seven pillars of Rotary is Housing, and Environment is another one now. So we collaborate where we can.

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Danya:

Have you heard of TinyHomeSTL, the group building tiny homes for folks displaced by the tornado on the North Side?

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Tiggs:

Yeah, we'll see what happens there. In Central West End, they have the resources and insurance to rebuild, so they're not worried about it. On the North Side, a lot of those people are going to have to pay back years of insurance premiums to even get covered. Then when they do that work on their house—guess what? They just improved their property value, and now their taxation is going to increase.

I've been sitting back and watching to see if there's going to be a collaborative approach to ensure the security of those people's resources. And in my opinion, it seems like it's just going to be a big land grab instead. They might throw a token project in there, but I don't think it's ultimately going to solve the issue of housing the people who need housing in St. Louis. The real question is, who's going to own that property? And I don't think it's going to be the tiny house people.

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Danya:

Your project statement on the MAPS website suggests that one of your goals is to create replicable models other St. Louisans will be able to implement. How do you plan to make your designs replicable?

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Tiggs:

It’s more about education. Through our Community Build Days, we have been able to identify like-minded individuals who want to do it. It's not for everybody. Right now, we are taking notes on what has worked and what hasn't with this project, and how we can scale up and empower others, create management positions, and create a larger neighborhood or network. And that's been the challenge we've gone back and forth on. What does a neighborhood look like? What does a community look like? Does it have to be 10 houses in a row to be a neighborhood, or can it be spread out and have a unified ideology? Someone does the woodworking, someone does the metalsmithing, and someone has the garden. It's that barter we are already doing, but scaling it up to a neighborhood 10 to 20 houses. That's really the goal right now.

As far as how that looks, what is the premise for utilizing recycled materials? It's creating housing within the parameters of the individuals who are building it. It's a great idea, but you might get into it and realize you don't have the time, money, or capacity to do it. So the next step is to evolve an actual, real community around building these structures.

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Danya:

To clarify, are you envisioning this group less as a network of other tiny houses with garden lots, and more as a community incorporating different forms of housing that already exist in the neighborhood?

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Tiggs:

Yeah, that's one way to look at it too. When I try to look beyond my time here and this tiny house, all I see is a brick facade. It's an old archetype, like the Colosseum. I believe that our structures and our environment should recycle the same as we do. Like that grass hut the Native Americans would leave in the field to go follow the herd, but still come back to the essence and safety of that space. That's what I see in the neighborhood with this space: at the end of the day, I'm not putting my footprint, my ego on it. I'm creating an archetype that others can pick and pull from.

And that's what I learned from Cassilly: I looked at how he picked and pulled. One of the things I love at City Museum are the columns with tiny old rubber stamps glued onto them to create texture. How can you spark someone's imagination from the articulation of your components? That's what I want to show people.

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Danya:

But you don't see your designs being replicated by a lot of people, right?

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Rikki:

This is extreme for a lot of people. I don't think everyone who comes to our Build Days is going to be like, "I can do this now," and go build their own tiny house. But maybe they're thinking about how they can reuse their materials more, or maybe they have more confidence going about a home repair project in their house and will use some of what we're doing in their own environment.

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Tiggs:

Even MAPS was like, "This is a little ambitious, guys." I often take it for granted that I'm fortunate to have my skillset. I can do plumbing, electric, building, woodwork, metal. And I think some people get hung up on the idea of success when they approach a problem. They are scared of failure. Here, we learn from failure all day long.

Sometimes people ask, "You got people showing up to build your house for free?" I'm like, "I don't think you get it." People show up when we are showing them how to solve a problem. We were putting the lighting in, so we had an electric day and showed everybody how to hook the lights up. Later I go to test the wires, and only one of the ten lights turns on. Fuck. So I spend the next eight hours up in the ceiling fixing it. Another time we were showing someone how to do the decking, and now there is a whole row of boards out there not screwed down.

So this really is a place for people to learn and make mistakes. In the real world, they are often apprehensive to take initiative, because they are scared of making those same mistakes. That's why a lot of people won't do something like this in the entirety of its scope. Even if you could do it but you didn't have access to the materials, those materials would cost more than the house is worth. This house technically isn't really economical to build for a single individual, but it is economical if a cohort of people came together with a collection of skillsets, modalities, and materials. Now it's a community, and a community built this house.

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Danya:

How do you plan to continue creating learning opportunities for the community once some of the major building projects are completed around your house?

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Rikki:

I don't know if it's ever going to be completed. There are so many projects! After we move in, there are still going to be projects, things to develop, and things to improve. I don't think we will ever be done.

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Tiggs:

We are doing additional two A-frames in the back. We are going to do a cargo container art studio. We plan on doing an urban hipcamp space in the empty lot adjacent to our other house up the street. We were flirting with taking a box truck and turning it into a little tiny house. We've got another cargo container behind our current building, which is a small apartment. So we are always engaging in these projects.

We are also thinking about bringing people to our lake house. It's going to be a program where you can come do a retreat and learn how to do some kind of design-build. It would also show people the context of the area—the Ozarks have some of the most beautiful country. So crossing urban and rural aspects is the next step as well.

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Danya:

Do you always base learning opportunities on your current needs, or do you sometimes listen to what skills in particular your neighbors are interested in learning and make building decisions based on their interests?

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Rikki:

Most of our Build Days have been based around where we are with the project.

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Tiggs:

People come up while I'm working outside, and they approach the project in several different ways. The first one comes up, walks right up on the front step, puts their hands on their hips. They walk through the garden like they don't care, right on the flowers. They don't even look at you; they just look around like they are at a gallery. "Huh, who's the architect?" 

The other kind do almost the same thing, but then they are like, "You know what you should do?" Please, tell me what I should do! Others walk up, and they're like, "Looking for somebody to work for you?" And then the last type shows up, and they go, "I like this. You're going to build me one." All those people are different. Some people want to be part of it, some people want to look at it and just sideline and criticize it, and some people want to possess it. They think they can commoditize it. We had one guy be like, "I want to come look at your house tomorrow. I got some property up on such and such. I want to build 10 of them." That's like asking, "Hey, can I go ahead and get the Mona Lisa to make some photocopies and then sell them?" 

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Danya:

Having been in the area for a long time, do you see gentrification happening in Benton Park? And if so, how can you protect your work around the neighborhood from being commodified and in turn contributing to further gentrification?

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Tiggs:

There has to be more local ownership. I think the gentrification that's happening is not being viewed through the right viewport. If we look at the market, most people your age can't afford to get a home. The baby boomers have some homes, but who is owning the rest? Large conglomerate organizations like BlackRock or McBride. So the gentrification that's happening isn't wealthy people coming in and pushing other people out. It's an actual enclosure movement, where corporations are coming in and buying entire communities.

When we commoditize our communities, there is no room left for clanship, for actual community. The answer is that we have to have more localized ownership, and not just individual ownership, but communal ownership. It does me no good just to own this house. This house, in my opinion, should be under a form of protection. Insurance is one, but there are types of insurance. I think education is going to be another big aspect of building community, because if we know about the legalities around our property, that's our sovereignty. The forefathers all had a copy of Blackstone [Commentaries on the Laws of England] in their back pocket. Blackstone was commenting on British law. And that information taught the forefathers how to navigate the language by which to justify rebellion. I feel that right now, we as a society have lost the language by which to organize rebellion—to own our neighborhoods, and therefore to have sovereignty.

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Danya:

What are some other uses you would be excited to see for a large post-industrial site like Cementland?

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Tiggs:

Building an understanding of the materials would be really cool there. If we were developing that brave new world, it would consider materials in more innovative ways. Not just putting it there because it looks good. For example, brick is a phenomenal material for thermal massing and retention of solar energy. But at this building, we have no brick on the back. It makes no sense to have brick on the back because it's north facing; it will never get solar gain and it will become a heat suck.

We would also promote education around implementing materials. Even down to the green spaces. For example, if somebody calls the Forestry Division about high weeds, they send four or five guys out for $150/hr for a minimum of two hours, and they chop everything down. Those guys aren't botanists; they don't know anything about plants. They are just charged with cutting at random. What happens if we educate those individuals about what we are trying to do, about permaculture and plants and nature? And then we educate people about solar energy and thermal massing? And we educate another person about water collection and purification? We build specialization into the community.

If we start teaching our children to identify the issues in this community we are building, and they get educated about addressing them, then we don't have a bunch of kids coming out of college not knowing what to do. Because they are now programmed to educate themselves about addressing the community's needs instead of trying to commoditize and capitalize on the community.

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Danya:

Rikki, from your experience with agriculture, do you think it's possible to reuse former industrial sites with suspect soil quality like Cementland for urban farming?

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Rikki:

It depends. You'd have to look at the soil and then at the environment around. Where is this industrial space? Because the environment isn't just your space. If I'm here and all of my neighbors are spraying tons of Roundup, then that's my environment too. So if you're in an industrial space where you have air pollution or  people dumping into the water source, it would make a difference.

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Tiggs:

There have been a couple of groups who have done some testing of that. They've planted sunflower fields and then tested the amount of lead in the flower versus the ground, realizing there is not that much of a problem with uptake. 

Chocolate is full of cadmium and lead. The darker it is, the more toxic. But it's just part of its composition. In the same vein, I've been reading about the Chernobyl dogs. They literally genetically mutated to adapt to that environment of highly radioactive soil, and they are fine. So it’s an interesting question: can we adapt to this industrial area rather than change it?