From the Ground Up

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Cob is the "new" old natural building material that acclimatizes, endures, and is as flexible as your imagination.

Our desire for a place of our own seems to begin as soon as we are moderately self-aware. I was living half my life in a tree house my older brothers had built from the moment I became strong enough to clamber up the branches of the cottonwood that held it. I don't know anybody, not anybody normal anyway, who didn't frequent some kind of a "fort" as a kid. As adults, we chase after a place of our own to an almost obsessive degree. It becomes the common justification for our daily toiling. Yet what is one of the most natural expressions of our humanity is completely out of reach for a great number of people. While some people are building colossal houses and consuming tons of natural resources, others are scraping and saving, clipping pictures, and dreaming of the day they'll be able to afford to have their own home.

The luckiest people I know are those who have learned how to build something themselves. Not only do they have a far greater chance of acquiring a place of their own, regardless of how much they're willing or able to spend, but inevitably they also have the most comfortable places. They fit their home around their lives, not the other way around. They make all their own decisions, and they know when they go to bed at night that what they sleep under wasn't hastily glued together in a factory; it was made with the attention and careful touch of their very own hands. I chose to attend a cob building workshop early this summer because, though I am not an architect or engineer, I still believe I possess the ability to make something lasting and beautiful to live in. And I believe most other humans probably possess this ability to a greater extent than me, since I don't relish operating anything other than a hand tool.

Cob is a mixture of clay, sand, and straw that is placed handful by handful on a building foundation. Thick walls sculpted from the material turn rock hard as they dry. The walls are fully load hearing and need no rebar or forms to support them. Building with a material as simple and strong as cob is a great equalizer. You don't need any machinery, very much money, or big hairy muscular arms to build with cob. You do need some land and access to day, sand, and straw either from your land or somewhere else. You need to he able to use your common sense, follow your intuition, and be willing to get very dirty. (These are things I try to do as often as I can anyway.) Most of all, you need a lot of time, more time than any other ingredient. At the workshop I attended in Arkansas, 20 people came to learn about cob and help Ann Lasater build a 200-square-foot hermitage at her Ozark retreat center. We started with a finished foundation and roof, worked four to eight hours every day for a week solid, and managed to get half the very small building's walls about half way up. The workshops will continue in October and then again in the spring until the walls reach the roof.