About Coenraad Rogmans
I love teaching natural building. My experience is that everyone can do it, the materials and techniques are very forgiving and people produce beautiful structures almost without exception. This makes the whole experience very uplifting and hopeful. Natural building is not just about building. It is also about health, community, empowerment, creativity and fun.
I am a native of the Netherlands, where I “grew up” and went to college. I graduated as a teacher in Health Education. We were taught not so much what was healthy and what was not, but more how we could help students make decisions in the context of their health that were well-balanced choices. Avoiding disease or living a long time, although interesting desires, were not at the center of the discussion. We rather emphasized freedom, choice, happiness, consciousness and connections to the community.
After college, I left my homeland to work at a children’s camp in Southern California, where I directed the summer camp program as well as the year-round outdoor education program. In Shakespearian fashion, I met my later-to-be wife and mother of my children, Courtney, while working at the camp (I was the guitar player around the campfire as well!).
In the summer of 1990 she and I went to visit Guatemala for a period of two months. We wanted to learn Spanish and explore the country. We ended up taking a course in organic farming and appropriate technology. We learned about solar ovens, photovoltaics, planting corn and rural communities. Since that time, providing uplifting alternatives to industrial consumerism has been a full time occupation for us.
At that time we were able to use our knowledge of alternative technologies as conference center directors, focusing on integrating solar technologies into the facilities that we were responsible for. In 1997 we stumbled into the Cob Cottage Company and in collaboration with them organized a Natural Building Colloquium at the conference center we were running in Southern Oregon. It was that same year that I took a one-week cob workshop.
Since that time I have helped organize and host four more national Natural building colloquia, taught a great variety of courses and workshops in cob and natural building, including work with children, and consulted with many clients on natural home design.
As a natural builder, I am excited about the gains we have made in the world, and how many people are interested in looking at houses and community in a different way. In order to help more people make their dreams come true I want to continue teaching high quality workshops as well as writing more, doing more research in the field of natural building, training more teachers and creating a local natural builders organization.
We work together with co-teachers, others in the natural building community and neighbors and friends. Together we create workshops that are fun and satisfying and often life changing. In 2004 James Thomson joined the House Alive team and has continued to work with us ever since.
No matter how much I love to teach natural building, I feel even more complete if I get to sing songs from the sixties and seventies around the campfire with a group of people. I try to sneak that in as much as I can during the workshops!
You can reach Coenraad at: coenraad@housealive.org.