I'm in Hawaii. Don't have time this sec to write much more except to say that I took quick advantage of some amazingly cheap airfares to Honolulu and also interisland to Kauai. I've never been here before. It is tropical. Yay!
I'm at a hostel in Waikiki for 3 nights, then heading to Kauai for 10 days to hike and suchlike. Yay! I have not been off the North American continent in almost 20 years. Hawaii is the most isolated archipelago in the world. It was not "discovered" by Europeans until Captain Cook until 1779. How the Polynesians found it is a good guess. They got around.
Given that cob was reintroduced to the world by a natural builder living in Oregon, it is no surprise that probably a majority of America's cob structures are also in Oregon, and quite a few in Portland. If Ianto had decided many years ago to settle in, say, Albuquerque, or Portland, Maine, rather than Cottage Grove, Oregon, many things about the cob revival would be different. Portland would not have its variegated collection of cob structures, City Repair would build things out of cedar planks, and I never would have discovered cob. Maybe I'd be writing about how I built a shack out of a reused shipping container (a fine enough idea) or maybe... who knows?
By the end of 2005 I really knew I wanted to build a cob cottage. I looked up cob online and discovered that several places offer workshops in cob construction. I tentatively decided to take the 6-day course offered by the Cob Cottage Company at their site near Coquille, Oregon, in early May. (I new nothing yet about the history of cob, and that Cob Cottage Company was Ianto, Linda, and several other pioneers of modern cob.) All I needed was a place to build.
In this, as in so many aspects of the project, something seemingly miraculous transpired. My friend Liza Jane sold her large house in lower north Portland and bought a smaller one in another neighborhood. She wanted to live alone in a very small house, but inspired in part by Peninsula Park Commons, she decided she also wanted some kind of small accessory dwellings in back of the house. At first she considered getting a Yurt or two, but when I realized she was serious about wanting an informal "mother-in-law" shack, I told her of my brewing notion to build a cob hut. She agreed immediately that it would be a perfect fit.
So there I was: a spot to build on, a workshop to attend, an idea beginning to manifest in physical reality. All I needed was the time to do the project itself. I had a decent job at the local transit agency. But work for someone else is still work for someone else. I put in my notice. Four months actually, but given the pace of the governmental bureaucratic hiring process, I knew they'd need the time to find my replacement. I also made the hard decision to sell my unit at Peninsula Park Commons. This was my way of establishing to myself that the cob thing was for real. I was going to live in it.
But where do you build a hut in the city? I'd learned a bit more of cob from seeing (though not yet participating in) several projects orchestrated by a visionary Portland organization called City Repair. City Repair came about as a response to the grid of streets and the disconnected anonymity of urban life. Founder Mark Lakeman discovered that if you could engage the residents of a typical neighborhood in a project of what has come to be called "intersection repair" you could create something heretofore lacking: community. Physically, intersection repairs are typically structures like hand-made benches, kiosks and plantings. The process of building them is a neighborhood event, often taking place during an annual May meta-event called the Village (originally Natural) Building Convergence. And because of the accidents and coincidences of history, the most common material from which these projects are made, is cob.
Cob is simple stuff. If it didn't exist, someone would have invented it. Actually, someone did, thousands of years ago. "Cob" is really just the old English term for what is without doubt the oldest and most widespread method of building in the world: clay soil, sand, and straw mixed together (with water) and formed into walls. That's it. Nothing more. A foundation of fitted stones, a roof of whatever is most handy, and there you have it. Adobe is basically the same thing except that it is made into individual bricks that are sun-dried and then fitted together. Cob walls, on the other hand, are formed as one continuous mass. This is much more seismically stable than adobe, not a concern perhaps in olde England but certainly here in Cascadia. In England and Wales there are cob cottages that are 500 years old. Once the walls have an earthen plaster on them and a roof over them, they will last practically forever.
Despite the intrinsic quality and usefulness of cob construction, it was abandoned in the early 20th century. Wood-frame and poured cement with rebar took over. There are many reasons for this. A lot of it had to do with the equations of time and money. Cob is labor intensive, and was usually built as a "cob-raising" multi-family shin-dig. Once it was up, well, you didn't have to build another one on that spot for quite some time. But society changed in the modern age, farms became fewer and larger, population shifted to the cities. It became simply easier to pay a crew to build a house out of materials, like cement, made cheap by the economies of industrial development and scale. No muss, no fuss, no baking pie for 40 people.
So cob was forgotten, a relic of the old-world countryside. But not everyone was satisfied to live in an industrially manufactured home. And not every architect was satisfied to design them: mind numbing iterations of the wood-framed, concrete slabbed, box. Standardized and multiplied by a million. In the early 1970's a young Welsh landscape architect named Ianto Evans was disgusted by his profession and the dehumanizing, resource wasting dross it churned out. So he abandoned "architecture" and invented natural building. Really. One of his earliest inventions was an earthen stove called the Lorena stove which has revolutionized home cooking and heating in developing countries. In the 1980's, along with his partner Linda Evans, he began to take close notice of cob buildings in Ireland and his native Wales. In 1989, back in his adopted home of Oregon, he and Linda built the first cob dwelling in the United States in at least 150 years. In the 1993 they founded the Cob Cottage Company and sparked the modern cob revival. Their refinements to the traditional technique, developed along with
Michael G. Smith and others, have come to be known as Oregon Cob. Oregon Cob is now the standard for cob construction in North America. For a great read on this subject and natural building philosophy in general, read "The Hand Sculpted House" by Ianto Evans, Michael G. Smith, and Linda Smiley.
Before hiking the AT I was, like many, a nature lover, a hiker, a gazer at beautiful scenes. I was also, like many, a workaday corporate drone who pretty much always wanted to be somewhere else. The tension between what I was doing (solving VERY important/petty problems in the distribution apparatus of a major online retailer, or commuting via automobile to and from that task) and what I wanted to be doing (hanging out in nature somewhere) grew to its maximum possible degree, and I jettisoned into the woods for 6 months straight. Actually the hike took me five and a half months, and although there were many moments of physical discomfort, it was absolutely the best experience of my life to that point. There is no one single thing that made it so, and describing the experience and its impact on oneself to those who have not had it is something that every thru-hiker struggles with. But to simplify, there were two things that made it so grand: being constantly in nature, and the people. The first is obvious. To wake up every morning to birdsong at dawn, then simply walk all day in the woods, and go to sleep as the last bird stops for the darkness, was amazing and wonderful beyond description. But what I also found out there with my fellow thru-hikers was an experience of community. I learned internally what it means to live at the most basic physical level, and to share time, stories, and food with people who in another context (for example if they lived next door to me in the city) would be total strangers.
When I got off the trail it was hard. I wandered like a long-bearded ghost through Boston, New York City (WTC ruins still smoking) and west again, landing in Portland. Portland was good. Although the trail experience quite truly ruined me for 50-week regular employment and "normal" existence, Portland had people who seemed to kind of understand where I was at, who had maybe arrived at that place themselves by some similar route. I lived in shared quarters with fascinating people, worked temp jobs, and took off for months at a time on further adventures (long distance bike touring, more hiking), always returning to a fascinating social milieu of artists, dreamers, and bicycling visionaries. And somewhere along the line, probably early 2003, on a perambulation in residential inner southeast Portland, I first saw a cob cottage. I didn't know what it was exactly. I could tell that it was a little earthen hut. It was round. Something immediately stirred in me. "That's cool! I could so live in one of those. Just a little hut in someone's back yard." Cozy privacy but part of an immediate community. The thought lingered, faded, brewed somewhere inside.
Slowly, my sense of the wrongness and misery of the typical patterns of housing and lifestyle conjoined with positive notions of what might be better, more enjoyable. In 2004 I had the great fortune to join a fledgling co-housing community in north Portland called Peninsula Park Commons. I lived there for two years and it was the best integration of privacy and community, ideals and action and sheer celebratory fun that I can imagine. But in the autumn of 2005 I re-read, for the first time since my freshman year in college, Henry David Thoreau's "Walden." And I knew, before I was even halfway through it, that his lesson had to be relevant. Not just as the prototype of all later books of self-help, self-reliance, anti-consumerism, and eco-philosophy. All that yes, but for me it was the inspiration to go another step further into the REAL real world, to in fact build a small but cozy dwelling, lit by sun, heated probably by wood (but small enough to need very little,) right in the city. To live here in the city with its critical masses of practical prophets, artists, and beautiful weirdoes, but un-divorced from nature. A kernel of natural-building and country-living here in the grid of streets. I had to do it. How could I not do it?
I didn't just wake up one day and say "hey, I think I'll get back to making a mud hut." Many things happened that brought me gradually to where I am now: proud papa of a brand-new, old as the hills, 200 square foot cob mini-house in a friend's back yard in Portland, Oregon.
What kind of mud do you build a house out of? Won't it wash away in the rain? Isn't it only appropriate in desert climates and places where everyone is too poor and ignorant to build out of something proper like cement or milled Doug-Fir lumber? And wouldn't it be dark and damp and dirty? Etcetera, etcetera.
Though rarely overtly spoken, these are the questions which prevailing wisdom would raise about earthen construction, if it bothered to think about the subject at all. The building industry, the "home improvement" industry, the HVAC industry, the mortgage lending industry, the index of leading indicators, macroeconomists everywhere, all would recoil at this notion: that anyone of able body, a couple months of time, and a few thousand dollars (or much less) can build a small but intensely functional and comfortable home out of clay, sand, straw, and a modest amount of lumber. No poured-concrete foundation. No Tyvek Home-Wrap. No drywall. No miles of heating and A/C ductwork. The only real requirement is this: a willingness to comprehend, and joyfully come to understand, that when it comes to house-size, smaller really and truly is better. Thoreau was right: simpler is better. Less expensive AND easier to construct. Less resource-hungry AND ergonomically smarter. Easier to get around inside of. Cozier. What more do you want from a house? Ah yes, a place to store all your stuff. All your very important stuff. To which I say this: if it is so very important, won't it be safer in an 8 by 10 storage locker? Or on top of a giant bonfire?
Thoreau was a prophet, a truth-sayer, a visionary philosopher and doer. His critiques of what we would call consumer-society were amazingly prescient. But he lived and wrote in a time of seemingly limitless growth and expansion. He was all the more gifted for seeing through the zeitgeist of gung-ho early capitalism into something more real. But few directly followed his example because they simply did not need to. Limitless resources. Land to the far horizon and beyond. Rivers teeming with fish, skies dark with fowl. You know the drill. All that stuff we churned through like kids let loose in the candy aisle at Wally World. Now we know better. We know better and yet, somehow, we are still paving over the landscape with clapboard trophy-home subdivisions. One after another, as far as the eye can see, and the roads and the cars and the strip malls, and the freeways and the cars and the mega malls, and the... You know it's wrong. I know it's wrong. Sick and wrong.
This fundamental disgust at what have done, and are still, astonishingly (for all our supposed idealism) doing to our countryside, was part of my motivation in building a cob house. But even now, the project more or less complete, I can't give any simple answer to the "why?" Like many of the things we do, the motivations are multifarious, many-rooted, obscure to the self. I know that I love nature. I have always deeply loved nature. I love it so much that I have come to the conclusion we must live closer to it, more in harmony with it, or we will destroy the natural systems that enable us to live, and that make us not just physically but spiritually who we are. I'm not unique in coming to such a conclusion. Lots of people have. A certain environmental awareness is a baseline condition of our cultural awareness and identity these days. But somewhere along the line I went from being satisfied with recycling my bottles and getting out on a hike once a week, to craving a life that is actually close to nature, not just in proximity but in the living of it. You know how good you feel when you've been camping for several days in a row? How real and vivid and alive the world is? I came to understand that it is possible to live in that kind of relation to reality on a more or less constant and permanent basis, but that it is nearly impossible in the disconnected urban/suburban/modern/pot-modern/industrial world that we live in. The experience that brought this home to me was through-hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2001.
I have begun writing about my cob project. Ultimately it will be some kind of zine or book. For now I will post unedited excerpts. Here is piece #1.
When I was 5 years old I tried to build a mud house in the back yard. I wanted to make a house like they lived in in Bible times. I called it a "bible house." I built the walls up to about 6 inches high and realized it was a lot more work than I had anticipated. Very labor intensive. I distinctly remember standing there in the late summer sun, Seattle 1973, thinking to myself "’m not going to be able to finish this." It was too much work. Winter came, the walls melted, then we moved away. The bible house faded into one of those memories of amusing things we do when we are little, like trying to fly by running with our arms out, or packing a red wagon full of provisions for an expedition down the block.
In 2006, at the age of 38, I finally finished the backyard mud house. I was definitely on to something when I was 5, but I lacked the right information and support. The world (or at any rate modern America) did not comprehend the notion of building a tiny but real earthen house in the back yard of a perfectly good 3-bedroom bungalow in a major city. There was no idea of the need for such a thing, or any viable method of actually making it happen. It was like planting corn in the tundra, or tossing seed onto bare granite. Naive, funny, hopeless. Not to mention useless.
A lot has changed in 33 years.