Are you a fan of pottery? Meditation and the art of simple Zen? What about off the grid living? Perhaps Cob Housing is for you? What is a Cob House? Put simply it is comfortable, low-impact, living spaces made from the earth itself and can last for hundreds of years.
When thinking about sustainability, there are few alternatives that can ethically or economically compete with something as complete as a cob house.
Some call the concept of cob housing a branch of Low Impact Environmental and Human Architecture. Making for something that doesnt disturb nature, or our human society, but rather, will build with methods that think of both in a more friendly way.
For example, what good would a structure do to the concept of sustainability if it were built following every environmental law, be the lowest impact building for nature in existence and yet use forced slave labor recently bought from Africa? That would not be sustainable architecture no matter how much the techniques, materials andconstruction used sustainable concepts, they need to be humane as well.
Thus there is a very present Human aspect to building with cob. In fact, cob housing can be a spiritual thing. It would be unethical to build any of our traditional housing using child labor for example.
But in the instance of cob housing, it is the house that builds the people, through the interaction with the process of sculpting earth into a living space. Children actually have fun doing cob and are some of the very best cobbers.
Just to imagine what a cob house looks like and how it is built, imagine for a moment that you have a wonderful piece of land that nobody wants or just bought, out in the middle of the boonies, away from it all.
You however, have no intention of destroying the delicate equilibrium that is already Mother Natures fascinating realm of perfection and cob housing is your solution.
Imagine you have tall grasses, a sandy riverbed and a beautiful brownish red soil underfoot. Throw them all together with about six parts sand, two parts soil, one part dry straw and one part water, poof! Instant cob mix.
The cob mix itself is not a scientific thing by any means, much less something store bought, it is just simply plain old soil, sand, straw and water mixed together like bread dough.
The cob is a brick made by kneading the mix and patting it down into a clayish pancake, then rolling it up like a piece of French bread from the bakery, and setting it in place on the wall like any other brick would be placed on a brick wall.
To really get the feel of how cob housing is constructed, WebLife.Org has an excellent e-book available called Cob Builders Handbook.
When we think of the origin of the word, cob it doesnt really bring up anything special, but literally it is an Old English word for lump of whatever, in this case a lump of soil, sand and straw.
Cob housing is built with sculpted earth and some that were built hundreds of years ago are still standing till this very day. Nothing could be more economical from an energy conservational point of view, and the fact that building them can be therapeutic, has been making this trend explode in places such as the northwest where Cob Cottages seem to be popping up more and more since the popularization of the Internet.
A Cob house is environmentally friendly, humane and therapeutic, costs almost nothing financially and is more comfortable to live in than traditional houses.
Image Credit:
Kate’s Mayne Island Cob House