Cob
AT GREEN APPLE, WE FEEL so strongly about putting out a positive message of what we can all be doing to improve our relationship with nature, that not only have we blogged about it in articles… and not only have we documented in with photography… but we have even produced a full-length feature movie about it! It has been called the definitive documentary about natural building, and it was shot in eight countries on four continents, over a period of over four years. Publishing house PM Press has signed on as distributor and will be officially releasing the DVD in a couple of months. The name of the film is FIRST EARTH – Uncompromising Ecological Architecture.
ALRIGHT, WE’VE GONE AROUND the world in eighty lines, showing you ultra-eco homes made from earth in every continent, climate, and culture, in The Healthiest Housing in the World. Then we flew to Portland, Oregon, the capital city of cob, to learn how civic activists are building benches made from mud to turn public spaces into community places, in Intersections and Interventions. And now to conclude our trilogy of blogs about cob construction, we will conduct a survey of some of the other structures that can be built from mud, that are bigger than benches, but not quite full-fledged houses. We hope to inspire you to re-imagine your landscaping to include all sorts of earthen structures that are both utilitarian and aesthetically pleasing. The Green Apple team has lots of experience with cob construction, and we are happy to include a cob structure as part of an overall re-design for your garden. And if you get so excited by it that you want to get in on the action yourself, as many people do, we’re happy to instruct you and your family and friends in cob construction so you can put together all kinds of cool cob projects.
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.
IN THIS BLOG ENTRY, we’re going to look at architecture that is ecological in the extreme. When we present you with examples of super-sustainability, we don’t mean to suggest that you should run right out and tear down your own home and build another one in its place made out of more ecological materials. Because of all of the energy that’s embedded in the house, and the difficulty inherent in disassembling it and recycling its component parts, it may or not make sense to do all that. But we’re presenting you with what’s possible when constructing wall systems, because these materials could be used to build outbuildings, or other structures in your yard that could add enormously to your experience of it. So pick up your passports, and prepare to head out on an audiovisual journey all around the earth, to see the healthiest homes made out of the very earth itself.
