THE FIRST CATEGORY THAT we will examine is the community newsstand. Maybe your neighbourhood has an actual newspaper that is distributed locally, like the Annex Guardian or the North York Mirror. Maybe it doesn’t — but that doesn’t mean that you can’t start one up! Whether it’s lost dog notices, yard sale announcements, advertisements for community activities, or just a forum for communication — every street corner could benefit from one of these. There are a few different variants on the newsstand; you could build a bulletin board that’s encased in a box and protected from the elements, where flyers can be affixed with thumbtacks (see first photo below). Or you could have an actual newspaper dispenser made out of cob where passers-by are encouraged to open the door and pick up a copy (see second photo below). In Oakland, California, I installed a couple of blackboards so that people could interact textually in the public space. It was widely used and much appreciated.

Sunnyside Piazza, Portland

Share-It Square, Portland

NEXT ON THE LIST IS the humble cob courtyard wall. I don’t mean a retaining wall to hold back an embankment, but a free-standing half-wall that separates your garden into quadrants. This may not be applicable to everyone out there; if your yard is small to begin with, there’s no point in carving it up into smaller sections. But for those with large gardens, it may make sense to create smaller pockets, little sitting areas that are more intimate, partitioning play areas from perennials. Or depending on what borders on your property and the amount of traffic you get regularly, you may want to create some kind of buffer zone that shields you from the sights and sounds of the street, or your other neighbours. A cob courtyard wall does that better than any fence or lattice ever could, because it has mass.  And of course, it’s far prettier to look at than geometric criss-crossing patterns, so the people you are retreating from won’t be nearly as offended.

Coquille, Oregon

Corvalis, Oregon

AND NOW WE TURN OUR attention to open-air Rumford fireplaces.  Ah, there’s nothing that comes even remotely close to sitting around the fire, warming your toes, watching the flickering flames do their infinite dance, and maybe roasting potatoes in tin foil, or jelly marshmellows, if you’re so inclined.  Of course you can just dig a pit in the ground and put a couple of rocks around in a circle to protect it from gusts of wind.  But then you’re losing 99% of the energy that’s bring burned, so you’re colder than you want to be, and wasting precious trees, as well.  However, if you build a cob wall behind the fire, that heat will be absorbed by the wall and reflected back at you, making much more efficient use of the fossil fuels, and keeping you toasty warm, to boot.  Anthropologists have even surmised that the earthen fireplace is actually the forebearer of the house — our ancestors didn’t build houses and then decide one day to bring the fire inside the house; rather, they first built earthen fireplaces, then kept adding on to the walls of the fireplace, until they enclosed the inhabitants in a house!  So it’s in everyone’s genetic memory to sit outside by the fire and gaze up at the stars.

Corvalis, Oregon

Mayne Island, British Columbia

THE LAST EARTHEN STRUCTURE that we will look at today is the cob oven. Have you ever eaten a pizza made in an earthen oven? Or perhaps you’ve have the opportunity to bake a challah bread in an old-school oven made out of real bricks, not moving metal parts? If you have, then you know that there’s no comparison, it tastes way better than Pizza Pizza ever thought possible. The oven will take longer to get hot, but once it reaches the requisite heat, it bakes the pizza at a much higher temperature, from all sides. If you’re a food connoisseur, you should not be without one of these in your backyard. Nothing says I love you like freshly baked croissants first thing in the morning!  Trust me, I know — my grandfather was a baker! The basic structure is the same every time — a hemispherical dome raised off the ground onto some kind of rock-hard platform — but it can be embellished in any which way you like, just like every other cob structure. Mm-mm, yum…

State University, Portland

Mayne Island, British Columbia

AS YOU’VE PROBABLY NOTICED, all of these cob projects have been built on the West Coast, there are precious few of them on the East Coast up in Canada. But a few months after we built the Spark Bench, the first cob project in Toronto, Georgie Donais spearheaded dozens of volunteers to build a sprawling cob complex for food preparation and outdoor play at Dufferin Grove Park, just south of Bloor Street. The project was so successful that it spawned a series of cob benches and other structures in the area. Cob in the Park is an incredible example of what cob is capable of, and I encourage you to head down there, especially now as the leaves are changing colours, to see for yourself what’s possible with a little bit of creativity, and a lot of love. Cob may not have made waves in the mainstream, but for hardcore ecologists, it’s one of the best ways that you can alter your environment and walk the talk. So if you embrace earth building right now, you’ll be one of the first few that will be able to boast about beautiful cob in your own backyard.

Dufferin Grove Park, Toronto

THERE IS ANOTHER SERIES of factors that led to the rise of the trend of bench-building. If you’ve ever been off the continent and strolled through a town in Tuscany or a village in Nigeria, you will have probably spent a good amount of time in piazzas: the plaza, platz, place. The narrow city streets are like arteries and veins that naturally flow in and out of the piazzas, the internal organs of the body urbana. There is where people congregate, trade, gossip, proselytize, flirt, fall in love. In summary, the piazzas are the hearts of the city (like multi-tentacled octopi, healthy cities have several hearts) — not the location where the social contract is signed and sealed, but the place where it’s written and rewritten daily, finger-painted and mud-sculpted, danced and sung, unorchestrated beautiful symphonies of flesh and bone. In cobblestone squares, the clock tick-tocks to the beat of the human footsteps and the click-clack of human-powered bicycles; cars and trucks and noisy engines of all sorts are banished to the periphery, where they cannot dominate the physical discourse. Now, where can these piazzas be found in the North American landscape?

THE SAD ANSWER IS THAT they are unfortunately absent from the cityscape in the US and Canada. Throughout the Old World, urban areas grew organically out of the medieval towns and villages that preceded them. Back in the day, houses were built haphazardly, based on the needs of the town’s inhabitants, in consultation with neighbours that were knowledgable about social conventions and customs, and with local builders who had experience with the materials and the micro-climate. Over time, the topography of towns would not look too dissimilar from the watering holes of any other animal, as seen from above. But nowadays, in urban planning schools all across the continent, two cities are held up as extreme examples: super-sustainable Portland, Oregon and far-too-rigid Toronto. If nearly all North American cities are symmetrical, Toronto is almost Borg-like in its religious adherence to the grid. Parallel lines make for superior high-speed viaducts, but poor incubators of human relationships. So it comes as nearly no surprise and even less protest when motorists run over cyclists and pedestrians with impunity, and the corporate media circles the wagons around the wagons.

European Capital Cities, clockwise from top left: Paris, Moscow, Rome, Madrid

North American Capital Cities, clockwise from top left: Chicago, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles

NOWADAYS, THE NATURE OF THE human occupation of the landscape is decided by undemocratic planning officials, an insulated bureaucracy of supposed experts. Like all other aspects of our society, what determines the outcome of how our city streets will be laid out, and what kinds of buildings will be permitted, is the arrangement that is most profitable to the top one per cent of the population. The most powerful people are most interested in ensuring that workers get as fast as possible to work, and as quickly as they can to the shopping mall to purchase more products from companies they own. As we speed up and down the corridors built specifically for cars, they make sure that we are inundated with all kinds of advertisements, as often as possible, to reinforce their automaton consumerist ideology. They don’t want people slowing down to talk and get to know each other, learning to trust in one another, sharing and receiving freely, gaining confidence in themselves and in their ability to provide for their own needs. The end result: an urban infrastructure plotted by the cold hand of totalitarian capitalism, hostile to our most basic human impulses as social animals.

BUT WHAT IF YOUR GRANDMOTHER had a bench to sit on so she could walk halfway around the block and then take a rest?  After catching her breath, she would have a conversation with some passers-by and share her knowledge of the neighbourhood’s history.  We should not have to pay for a cup of coffee just so we can rest our weary feet, we should be able to take a seat next to the sidewalk for free; it should be a guaranteed right, not a privilege!  What if our street furniture wasn’t spat out by an industrial process, made of plastic materials; what if it didn’t have to advertise corporate logos and consumer products, blare out purchase orders at eye level?  Instead, we should have furniture objects that were obviously made by real people, by human hands, with love and care and attention to detail.  They should be comfortable and made from natural materials, colourful and playful; public space is our birthright, not a commodity!  This is the City Repair revolution in Portland, Oregon:  not only to build earthen furniture, but to do it where people’s paths cross, to intervene in the urban machine with creativity and to contest the cold culture of enclosure.

I FIRST DISCOVERED THE eco-artistic placemaking movement in Portland back in 2004, and when I got back to town, I organized the construction of Toronto’s first-ever Cascadia Cob bench. Peter came out and got his hands and feet wet, learned the technique and helped build the bench. Two years later, he was so inspired that he built a cob bench of his own right outside his house in East York. Now we’re inviting our clients to imagine what their own homes might look like with the addition of a cute little cob bench. If you are moved by the hand-sculpted aesthetic of the cob, and you’d like to create a personal private zen retreat out of earth, then we can certainly work that into an overall design for your back yard. And if you want to contribute to the community as well, then we are eager and excited to help you incorporate an earthen bench into your front yard, one that faces the sidewalk and invites your neighbours to sit down and say hi. Either way, any cob structure is going to give you good vibes, knowing that it was made from all-natural materials without any unnecessary fossil fuels, and molded into whatever funky shape your happy heart desires.

Peter mixing the cob

Cascadia Cob bench in Peter's front yard

WHEN I FIRST STARTED STUDYING ecological architecture, I set my sights on straw bales. I’m sure you’ve heard of these — by this point straw bale buildings have pretty much completely penetrated the consciousness of even mainstream society. Because the bales are rectangular blocks that are the by-product of an industrial process — removing the seed from the chaff in wheat fields — they relatively easily lend themselves to the construction of homes that are also rectangular and industrially-built, the kind that we are used to aesthetically, and have come to demand for reasons of convenience. But if we look past the industrial paradigm, there is another option that is far more ecological. Because it’s rough around the edges and demands more people participation, it hasn’t been as popular with the masses. But without doubt, it is the material that uses the least amount of fossil fuels and creates the least amount of pollution. This material is mud.

NOW WHEN I SAY THE PHRASE “earthen architecture”, the first thing you think of is probably a mud hut. And certainly, mud huts are sterling examples of ecological housing. Everyone in the indigenous village knows how to build and repair one of these out of locally-sourced natural materials. They’re adequately warm in the winter and comfortably cool in the summer, without any artificial air-conditioning system. The thatch roofs last just as long as any other modern conventional roofing material; they repel heavy rains for fifteen years or more before they have to be replaced. And they don’t off-gas any toxic chemicals, something you cannot say about any industrially-produced building at all. Here is a classic example of a mud hut par excellence in a small Oromo village outside of Addis Ababa. That’s Peter on the far right — we took these photos on a trip to Ethiopia three and a half years ago.

BUT EARTHEN BUILDINGS ARE NOT only the purview of African peoples. For example, the house below is made of the exact same materials as the house above — clay, sand, and straw… but it was built over 300 years ago in Devon, England! And it isn’t a empty, unused museum piece — the house is still lived in by a family of four, and it’s furnished not unlike any other modern dwelling in the UK, as you can see in the interior photograph. We shot these images on the same continent-hopping eco-education trip in the winter of 2006. And this house is not a bizarre exception to the rule; there are over a hundred thousand earth-homes just like it across the United Kingdom that remain in use to this day. So Canadians that trace their direct ancestors to Northern Europe also come from a rich cultural tradition of building healthy houses out of earth.

NOW LET ME BLOW YOUR MIND open even wider: If you think that third-world mud huts and quaint cottages in the countryside are all that earth is capable of as a building material, then you are tragically misinformed! From Ethiopia I flew on to Yemen, the first country in Arabia to become a democracy. Deep in the deserts, there are whole cities that are hundreds, even thousands of years old, dating back from biblical times — cities filled with earthen skyscrapers! I am not joking — I went to a couple of construction sites, and they still build in this way, out of sun-dried adobe brick. There are no steel girders or concrete beams; only unmilled wooden poles to hold up the earthen floors above. The walls may be up to a meter thick at street level, but they rise six, seven, or eight stories high — veritable Manhattans of Mud! I took the photos below, starting from the one in the top-left corner and continuing clock-wise, in the towns of Hajarin, Shibam, and Kataira, respectively.

HERE ON THIS CONTINENT, we have our own native natural building tradition that uses sun-dried earth bricks, as well. During the Arab occupation of Spain, the Spaniards learned of the brick, “al-dob”, which they pronounced “adobe”. And when the Spanish in turn colonized North America, they brought this building technology along with them to the lands that they conquered. Settlers built the oldest house in the USA that is still standing, in Sante Fe, New Mexico, out of adobe bricks. And when they arrived in the area that would come to be called the southwestern United States, they found that the First Nations people of Taos Pueblo had already been building their homes out of earth for at least five hundred years, by that point. The Pueblo and the whole region still retain their distinct architectural character, even after all this time. I captured these images of the Indian village two summers ago.

OKAY, HAVE I THOROUGHLY proven that earth is a most amazing building material that deserves careful consideration? Well, about twenty-five years ago, a few people on the West Coast were certainly convinced of it. They amalgamated their knowledge of construction techniques from around the world, did research and development into appropriate technologies, and developed the earth building style called Cascadia Cob. The result is essentially the same as all of the other earth sciences — thick walls of sub-soil muck — but what sets it apart is that it’s often curvilinear, spirallic. Inspired by deep ecology and a counter-culture ideology, these cute little hobbit houses often feature whimsical imagery and sculptural details in bas relief. Here are some photos I took in 2004-5 of home-grown Canadian cob cottages built within the city limits of Vancouver.

PRETTY AWESOME, EH?

IF DULL DEVELOPERS want to transplant tufts of grass and call them green roofs, and if Hundertwasser would weave thick, shaggy manes onto the tops of buildings, Malcolm Wells would turn them into sasquatch structures, unrecognizable to our industrialized eyes. The only possible contemporary comparisons are to acknowledged wonders of the world, Peru’s Machu Picchu, or Cambodia’s Temple of the Unknown. But though he once taught environmental design at Harvard, don’t expect institutional architecture to acknowledge his greatness and shower him with accolades today. Up until now, only maybe three or four thousand earth-sheltered houses have been built in the USA; the godfather of underground architecture is an unsung eco-hero.

I HAD THE PLEASURE of visiting Malcolm Wells at his home in Massachusetts in the winter of 2005. Unlike almost all other egomaniacal architects, he is lovingly humble. Incredibly articulate, I will let Mac speak for himself, tell you in his own words about his half-century-long mission for a more gentle architecture: “Every building on Cape Cod — residential, commercial, religious — looks like this, or like some modified version of it. There are tens of thousands of them, and they are very popular. They show us, at a glance, just how far the human animal has come in its 10,000-year quest for an appropriate means of shelter. To build in that way requires that the native New England forest be stripped away and replaced, after construction is complete, by a toxic green lawn and plants native to some other region.”

“AS AN ARCHITECT, I’m ashamed of what my fellow professionals and I have done during the last fifty years. Russell Baker was right when he asked, ‘Why do Americans hate lawyers so much when architects are doing far more than lawyers can to make the country unlivable?’ Pay us a fee and we’ll do anything. What do we do? Look around you: America’s best land: destroyed, nature: crushed under buildings and parking lots, resources: squandered, energy: wasted. The saddest part is that we know better and still do nothing about it. We actually know how to build without destroying land.”

“REGISTERED TO PRACTICE architecture in 1953, I spent the first eleven years basking in my own greatness. I got design awards, I got my name in the paper, and I made more money than perhaps a young man should make. Churches and factories and schools and offices of my design were built on nature woodlands and fields of wildflowers. Then I woke up: I wasn’t a creator. I was a destroyer: my buildings, with their parking lots, walks, plazas, and toxic green lawns had wiped out everything that had been alive there… In 1964, after ten years spent spreading corporate asphalt on America in the name of architecture, I woke up one day to the fact that the earth’s surface was made for living plants, not industrial plants. I’ve been an underground architect ever since.”

“WE LIVE IN AN ERA of glitzy buildings and trophy houses: big, ugly, show-off monsters that stand — or I should say stomp — on land stripped bare by the construction work and replanted with toxic green lawns. If the buildings could talk they would be speechless with embarrassment, but most of us see nothing wrong with them, and would, given the opportunity, build others like them, for few of us realize that there’s a gentler way to build. It’s called underground… By letting our structure hog all the sunlight wherever we go, we stamp out much of the natural riches of our land. Weather is not kind to building materials. They need to be protected by a blanket of earth. Otherwise, ice cracks the freeways, water rusts bridge structures, floods rage because water cannot soak into impervious ground.”

“A BUILDING SHOULD consume its own waste, maintain itself, match nature’s pace, provide wildlife habitat, moderate climate and weather and be beautiful. That’s a series of pass/fail evaluation criteria… And it was quickly apparent that unlike all conventional buildings these actually healed the wounds cause by their construction, allowing native plants and animals to move back onto them. Blankets of living land not only made sites healthy, they offered all kinds of other benefits: greatly reduced energy use; bright, dry interiors; fire resistance, silence, ease of maintenance, and permanence. Not only that, they were living proof that there is a simple and appropriate alternative to America’s wasteful and destructive building practices.”