AS I ALLUDED TO IN OUR previous blog entry The Healthiest Housing in the World, earth may be the best possible material for building walls with, but it doesn’t mean that that’s all you can use it for. If the modern mud building movement was born in the temperate rainforests of rural Oregon, then the capital of urban earthen architecture is the state’s most populous city, Portland. Country homes made from Cascadia Cob have been built out in the woods for the last twenty-five years, and mud structures on city streets have existed for half of that time. Obviously, land comes at a great premium in the city centre, and almost all properties are already occupied by brick buildings. It’s hard to find an empty space to squeeze a new house into, and then once you find your narrow little plot of land, it’s even harder to justify constructing something on it that has at least eighteen-inch-thick walls. Not to mention that in those days, when next to no building officials had even heard of earthen homes, it was hard to get them to sign off on the engineering. So a new initiative started up around building benches out of earth.

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