Landscape Design
AFTER FINISHING A THREE-ARTICLE focus on cob construction — building houses, other structures, and furniture out of earth — I began thinking about sod. Cottages are a literal scaping of the land into human habitation, terraforming the very earth into shelters; sod has been used for some of the same purposes here ion North America. The difference between the two is that cob is dry straw mixed into sub-soil, while sod is the first few inches of the topsoil, which contains the rhizomatic roots of the living grass that grows on top of it. So if we can include cob objects in our landscape designs, what’s possible in the way of sod structures?
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.
THIS PAST WEEKEND, I TRAVELED to New York City to see an exhibition of landscape architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Well, okay, the MoMA exhibit was not the main reason I went to New York — enjoying the last gasp of summer with a little vacation time in the Big Apple was my primary objective. But while I was there, I stumbled upon this interesting exhibit, and so I took the time to check it out and to document it. So I’m uploading some of the photos that I took at the gallery, complete with the original texts that accompanied the drawings and models. And I’ll add just a few short words of my own by way of introduction: More often than not, art installations and academic articles about architecture are incomprehensible and irrelevant. But occasionally it is a valuable exercise to see what so-called institutions of higher learning and haughty-totty art snobs are saying about our industry, because some of these ideas can lead to new ways of understanding the landscape and how we might better transform it…
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.
