The Year of Mud

This year, I will build a house out of mud. More specifically, I will construct a small cob cottage, composed mostly of materials straight from the surrounding earth: clay, sand, and straw. Over the past year, I have grown to love and appreciate cob’s simplicity, beauty, and minimal impact on our precious natural resources — after all, most of the materials can be dug straight out from underneath our feet.

Last year, I had the opportunity to work exchange with Ironweed on their cob kitchen for three solid months. My appreciation for cob culminated over those long summer days, stomping batches of mix, sculpting and plastering walls, and shoveling a whole lot of sand and clay. I love the sheer immediacy of cob; anyone can hop in and stomp a few batches, and sculpt walls without any prior experience. You don’t really need a heck of a lot of building know-how to work with the medium. It’s a communal experience, dancing in piles of sand and clay, and cooperating with your friends and neighbors. Cobbing is quiet, without much need for power tools, and it’s a very physical experience. And there’s something that makes you feel more human, dare I say more feral, in some way, building with such basic elements.

My interest in natural building came to a peak during those days of work exchanging, and I began to daydream about eventually constructing my own little house. The future is now and I have completed my own designs and floor plans, and I’m ready to start digging. I’ve already begun collecting materials and I only await a warren to officially begin the trek down the long road to building my own house.

The basic design is a cob spiral, a sort of snake-like shape, with the entrance facing south, but located and opening into the northeast curve of the building. The south-facing curved wall is filled with windows to maximize solar gain. The building will feature a living reciprocal roof, a self-supporting conical structure composed of pin oak poles, hand-cut from the land. I learned about this innovative design from Mark of Red Earth Farms and was immediately taken with the concept. The roof proved to be the most challenging aspect of my design, since I have had zero prior experience either designing or building roofs. However, I am excited by the prospects of a reciprocal roof. And I love the idea of a living roof, covered with soil that will eventually nurture wild grasses, flowers, and perhaps even a few strawberries. The building will have a hand-built rocket stove for heat, with a chimney that wraps through and heats a four-foot wide cob bed. The interior living space will be very small (a.k.a. cozy), approximately 11’x12’, but I plan to make effective use of the space with shelves cobbed directly into the walls and other little nooks for candles and oil lamps (since I don’t intend to have a power system).

In conceptualizing and designing this building, it was very important for me to consider the energy inputs and locality of building materials and supplies. It is a goal of mine to depend on as few non-local, non-natural materials and fossil fuels as possible. For instance, instead of having local trees milled for dimensional lumber, I became convinced that using pole wood direct from the property here at Dancing Rabbit would be an even more ideal option. Those poles were cut by hand out on the land, and then transported to the village via handcart with the help of willing friends. How fulfilling this was, compared to having someone else cut and mill trees, and then deliver the final product by truck.

Plans include a living roof

These thoughts are part of the inspiration for me in designing a cob cottage. Cob is an ancient building process. It makes use of very immediate resources, and it is largely a human-powered, hand-built process. It has a very low ecological impact. And it’s beautiful, too, with walls that look like they are sprouting directly up from the ground. It’s my hope that cob, and other long-proven and sustainable building methods, will eventually catch on in a big way, since it does not seem reasonable that the world will be able to support the construction of too many more McMansions.

This is the year of mud, and I greatly anticipate the experience of building my own cob house from the ground up, from what the earth provides to me.

A sketch of the interior of Casa de Brian

March Hare Spring 2008 Issue 56

The Year of Mud		Dreams and Waking
Deconstruction 101		Profiles
Jan’s Autobiography

Come see our past issues for lots of Dancing Rabbit information.