The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage: The Real Goods Solar Living Book by Ianto Evans, Michael G. Smith, Linda Smiley and Deanne Bednar exhibits how one can build a house the best way others create a pure garden. They use the oldest, most out there materials imaginable--earth, clay, sand, straw, and water--and mix them to redefine the future (and past) of building.
Cob (the phrase comes from an Old English root, meaning "lump") is a mixture of non-toxic, recyclable, and sometimes free materials. Building with cob requires no forms, no cement, and no machinery of any kind. Builders actually sculpt their buildings by hand.
Building with earth is nothing new to America; the oldest constructions on the continent were built with adobe bricks. Adobe, nevertheless, has been geographically restricted to the Southwest. The boundaries of cob are outlined solely by the builder's imagination. Cob affords answers relating to our position in Nature, family and society, about why we really feel the ways that we do, about what's lacking in our lives. Cob comes as a revelation, a key to a saner world.
Cob has been a standard building process for millennia in Europe, even in rainy and windy climates just like the British Isles, the place many cob buildings nonetheless serve as family homes after a whole bunch of years. The approach is newly arrived to the Americas, and, as with so many social developments, the early adopters are within the Pacific Northwest.
Cob homes (or cottages, since they're at all times effectively small by American building standards) will not be solely suitable with their surrounding, environment, literally rising up from the earth. They're full of light, energy-efficient, and comfortable, with curved partitions and constructed-in, whimsical touches. They're delightful. They are ecstatic.
This can be a building method so old and so easy that it has been all but forgotten in the rush to synthetics. A cob cottage, cobb, nonetheless, is likely to be the final word expression of ecological design, a construction so attuned to its environment that its creators confer with it as "an ecstatic house.
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