Somehow, the people that live in the house also don’t feel like they belong: every 2 or 3 years someone new moves in. The current owner changed the color of the house from stark white to a darker green, which made the rest of us very happy. After all, the house is standing in the middle of a beautiful 5 acre (green) meadow. Also, on my last drive-by, I noticed that there was some tree planting activity going on, in particular right around the house. In a strange way the house belongs now a little more. And perhaps the current owner also feels like he belongs a little more too.

People living in houses that belong will tend to have stronger feelings of belonging as well. For people, the feeling of belonging is rooted in one of those basic needs that is linked to our need for survival. A sense of belonging is directly related to concepts such as tribe, community and culture and consequently with feelings of security, safety, stability and purpose. People who don’t feel like they belong are unhappy, insecure, afraid. Those who feel like they do belong feel the opposite: happy, secure, loving.

The more your house becomes a place where you feel like you belong, the more it becomes a “Home.” In this context, “home” is not just a cozier word for house. More so, The term “home” can be better understood by looking at it as ever-evolving, metaphysical and dynamic.

A good home is ever evolving, it is not static. Small and big changes to the house, the yard, the furniture, the kitchen table, even the lights, will increase or diminish the quality of the home. So does the arrival of a new baby, the turning of the seasons, a new job or retirement, kids or parents moving in and out and the make up of the neighborhood.

Which leads us to the fact that the term “home” is not just physical, it’s metaphysical. A true home is the physical reality of a house, augmented by thousands of other activities– laughter, cooking, eating, washing, singing– that help create the feeling of home. Thus a home cannot be separated from the people living in it. A house with no people is a non-home. It’s just a house. (realtors sell houses, not homes).

Therefore it is vital to consider “Home” a dynamic concept. the physical reality of the home influences the events that take place. And as the events change, they will inevitably bring us to change the physical reality of the home.

For example, say someone is given a bouquet of flowers. She puts the flowers in vase on the table. Being around the flowers reminds her that she would like more flowers around the house, so she goes and buy some pansies to put in the yard. As she is digging them in, she starts up a conversation with the neighbor. They both decide to have a BBQ together this weekend, for which she will need to build a table for the yard…

In the above example, the home is constantly evolving. There are physical changes (the flowers, the pansies, the table), but there are also changes in feelings, relationships, and connections. We should think of a home as a dynamic, living process rather than a static, dead product. A home is nothing less than a house that feels alive!

9 months later, I am finally putting the finishing touches on the project. The old expression that building anything always takes longer and costs more than you think it will proved to be true, even for someone who often tells people that their project will take longer and cost more than they think!

Part of my intention for the project was to incorporate some natural building techniques into what is otherwise an ordinary, conventional home. I did not want to build new cob walls or insulate with bales: these things would have been challenging not only with the space I had available, but also to get past the code officials (I did everything with permits). But earthen finishes, such as plasters, paints and floors, require no permitting and are easy to retro-fit into existing spaces; so I decided I would do as much of that as I could.

For parts of the downstairs, I applied a custom-made earthen plaster over new and existing drywall, and for a remodeled bedroom I mixed and applied a simple clay paint. Both turned out beautifully. I chose not to go over the walls of rooms that were mostly intact- there seemed little reason to go over perfectly good, existing paint.

I got to try some more interesting stuff upstairs, where I didn’t have pre-existing walls. Instead of putting drywall up over my new walls there, I decided to try to mimic the traditional plaster-and-lath technique that you find in the older houses here. Traditionally, strips of wood lath ¼ inch thick and 1 inch wide were nailed up over the studs about ¼ apart. Next, a layer of lime plaster (made of lime, sand, and horse hair) was used to cover up the lath. This coat was followed by two or three additional coats, which further strengthened and smoothed the wall.

For my walls I didn’t want to use lime- not only does lime have high-embodied energy, it’s also caustic and harder to work with- so I did the same procedure but with an earthen plaster made of clay, sand, and chopped straw. I followed this rough coat with another “scratch” or second coat, and then finally a finish coat of very thin plaster with color. The results are beautiful, and the walls feel as stable and solid as drywall.

I recommend this technique for anyone who is drawn to the idea of having natural earthen walls for aesthetic or idealogical reasons, but not because they think it will be easier or cost less. Drywall goes up very quickly (especially if you hire a crew) and is very inexpensive due to mass production. But it is also an environmentally destructive product that requires significant mining, manufacturing and transportation operations. And when it is time to remodel or tear the house down, it all goes to a landfill. My walls, should I ever choose to tear them down, could literally be spread in the front yard or in my garden.

Another interesting thing I tried on my house was a small section of exterior earthen plaster. I applied 2 coats of plaster over reed mats that were stapled to the siding. The plaster contained no cement or artificial sealers. It did have some flour paste in it to help minimize erosion. The areas I chose to plaster are fairly well protected from the rain, but after a Portland winter have gotten wet plenty of times and still look great. I am considering finishing my whole house this way when it comes time to redo the siding or paint…

The last “earthen experiment” I tried was to put in an earthen floor in an upstairs bedroom. I’ve done earthen floors over ply-wood before, but never on the second floor of an older house. Weight of the earth and movement of the sub-floor where both concerns, so I poured a very thin floor (1/2” thick) and imbedded burlap netting in the mix to add tensile strength. So far it looks beautiful and only has a few hairline cracks.

After my experience integrating these earthen techniques into my house I am convinced that there are many applications for natural building in conventionally built homes. But it’s not for everyone: these techniques are not widely known, and if you are concerned about resale value, or don’t want to do maintenance yourself, it may not be a good choice for you. There is no evidence to show that earthen finishes would in anyway reduce the value of your home, but they are just not materials that are widely known and understood, which might reduce the number of potential buyers. But unless you plan to sell your home very soon, I think you would be much better off creating a place that YOU love, rather than worrying about what some future owner will or won’t want. The only thing stopping you from integrating natural building materials into your home is the willingness and the time to try it!

Let’s first look at the material cost of wall systems. Although digging up the dirt around your site might be cheap, most people still have to import straw and sand. Often the ground is prohibitively hard and equipment is brought in to do some of the digging. If you then take into account that it will take you longer to build with cob than to frame a stick frame wall you may discover that the cost of the materials of the walls is not much cheaper than that of conventional buildings. This is partly so because conventional building materials (2×6′s, drywall, ply-wood) are mined and mass-produced without much care for the earth and are therefore ridiculously cheap.

Needless to say that the quality of a cob wall is much greater than that of a conventional wall. This in it of itself creates what we could consider secondary cost savings: The building needs less heating and cooling, doesn’t make us sick, and we actually like it so much that we don’t want to move. These cost savings, which are not directly related to the building process and stretch out over a longer period of time, already makes it worthwhile to consider cob. How about the building process itself? Here are some reasons why people can build cob houses for a song.

1. Cob is well suited for “Owner-builders,” i.e. you can do most (or all) of the work yourself. This can make a house a lot less expensive, assuming you don’t make huge mistakes because of inexperience (take a workshop!). Of course you have to take into consideration that while you are building you are often not able to make money yourself. For many of us this requires careful financial planning.
2. Cob buildings tend to be smaller. Smaller buildings require fewer materials and take less time to build, making them less expensive. Because of its sculptural qualities, built-in furniture and “roundish” character, one can often be as comfortable in a cob house that is half the size of a conventional house.
3. Kitchens and bathrooms are kept simple and practical. Even a poor quality kitchen or bathroom in a conventional house can run you $10,000 and up. It’s not unusual for them to start falling apart after the first year and be ready for the dump after 10 years. On the contrary, a cob builder may consider a wooden counter, a second-hand range and a sink which can all be put together for under $250 and can provide a comfortable place to prepare food. That is all assuming that you have some carpentry skills (or have a carpenter friend) and are creative in finding second-hand and free stuff. I spent about $500 on my kitchen, which included a small refrigerator and a new propane range.
4. Cob can make almost anything look good and therefore it is a lot easier to integrate “odds and ends” into your building. The weirdest items can look good in a cob wall! A rotten piece of driftwood, a hubcap as a built-in shelf, any shape window that was a reject from a conventional project or came out of a remodel, you name it and cob can make it look good. Even a few cracks in the wall or a plaster that is not perfect tends to add charm to a space. A beautiful cob wall looks just as good with new or used materials: a brand new roof or a scrounged miss-matched tin roof, a pre-fab counter top or a hand-made wooden table– cob works well with both.
5. Cob buildings often are not built to code. This frees the builder from building according to standards that were written in part because the building industry pushed for it or because of irrational liability fears. Having said that, some code regulations do make sense and have made buildings safer, but it has become very expensive to build to those standards. Of course, unpermitted buildings don’t have to pay for permits either. I did a rough calculation for my own house, which is permitted and cost about $50,000. I figured that if I did not have to build to code I could have saved about $10,000 and still have the same quality house.
6. Cob buildings are mostly not seen as an “investment property”. People mostly want to go the “cob way” because they want to leave the world of housing speculation. They want to find home, a place to put down roots. Because cob buildings can be so inexpensive, there is also no need for loans and therefore no need for collateral and the requirements that come with that.
7. Many cob cottages were built (with permission) on other people’s land. This eliminates the cost of the “building lot.” And why not: Hhow can you own the land?” the Native Americans rightfully ask us. Although these agreements feel like something that our culture does not approve of it happens all the time: people with very little money and income have a place that feels like their own, a place that is real and empowering.

So, if all of the above is something you can live with, you can build a nice place to live in for very little money. People with little building experience have with $5000 (and occasionally just $1000), and a lot of time, built themselves and their family a beautiful little house.

“Being home” however, means more than just physically being in the house. The more your house is set up to to be a pleasant place to be, the greater the chance that connections are made. In that light it is of great importance to separate “Being in” spaces from the “going through” spaces.

In order to understand this critical issue, let’s start with a very simple house that we are all familiar with: A tipi. These simple lodges are entirely about “Being in”. Once you have entered, all you can do is sit down and face the other people in the circle. The person responsible for keeping the fire going usually sits by the door. Now suppose we feel a little cramped and we want to double our space by adding on another tipi. And let’s say we cut a door opposite the original door and add another tipi. Now, in order to get to the second tipi you have to walk through the first tipi; the original “Being in” space has also become a “going through” space. We can intuitively feel that the character of the original tipi has completely changed. Here is the thing we have to consider: It is awkward to “Go through” a “being in” place, but it is even worse to “be in” a place that is also used as a “going through” place. In other words, it is much harder to connect to people and place if people walk though your space all the time. Or even more simply: No one likes to sit in a hallway.

It may seem that I am just stating the obvious here, but apparently this concept is not very obvious if you look at our stock of modern houses. Often it is hard to find one single “Being in” place in a house. How can we tell? Quite easily: A “Being in” space is usually a dead-end space, with only one door or entrance (think tipi), while a going “through place” is a place with more than one door or entrance. It turns out that most rooms in most newer houses have more than one door or entrance.

It is important to note that it does not matter whether those doors are being used or not: Our ability to feel present in a place is directly influenced by how we perceive the possibility that someone would or could walk through our space. That perception is formed by what we observe in the space around us; even if we had a room with a bunch of doors to nowhere (if you were to open them all you would see would be the wall), it would still feel like a “going through” place. Even people who are alone most of the time should respect this phenomenon in their house: Even if you are absolutely certain that no one will ever pass through, a room with 2 doors still feels like a hallway.

Consider a bathroom. If there is one time when you would not want people to walk through your space, it’s while you are sitting down with your pants down. Even if you knew both doors were locked, your perception of safety would be greater in a bathroom with one door. Friends of mine have it even worse. Not only are there 2 doors in the bathroom, they also have no locks. To top it off, the shower stall is made of regular glass and faces one of the doors.

Now imagine you are sitting on a couch in a living room. There is a door behind you and a door in front of you. You are now essentially sitting in a hallway, because if someone would want to enter the living room from one door and leave through the other door, the couch you are sitting in is in the way of the shortest route. We naturally want to go the shortest route so now you are nothing less but an obstacle to be dealt with. That is certainly not very conducive to your desire to connect with people and place.

Or, let us visit the kitchen. As I am walking toward the coffee maker I suddenly bump into one of the more recent trends in kitchen design: The island. As handy it is to have all that extra counter space, the 3 foot space all around the island has become a “Going through” space. You are now cooking, cutting, serving, dealing with hot items, opening refrigerators and ovens, all in the middle of a walkway.

It is not uncommon to see family rooms with 4 or 5 entrances, which allows for what I have heard architects refer to as “Circulation”. Unfortunately, that is all these rooms become: A series of undefined pathways that makes it hard to do anything in those room that would help you to concentrate, have a conversation, make music or read, connect to people and place. At the same time, when you ask people what their favorite place in the house is, they often mention the one room or spot that is a dead end.

So how do we avoid “Going through” spaces that are meant for “being in”? One solution is a hallway. They are the simplest way to seperate “Being in” places from “going through” places. But hallways have their own set of problems. They are often windowless and therefore gloomy and unpleasant, especially if they are narrow. They are also expensive. Each square foot needs to be built maintained, heated and cooled. I have visited custom designed houses that were so poorly designed that they had as much as 60% of their surface area dedicated to hallways and “Going through” places. At 2 or 3 hundred dollars per square foot (for construction costs), that really adds up.

In the process of ridding ourselves of the gloomy hallways, designers have embraced the “Open floor plan” and in the process often forgot to consider the “Going through” spaces. As houses have increased in size, there needs to be a lot of “Going through” spaces to get to all the rooms and in the “open floor plan” that usually means walking through different rooms. That is how we ended up with so many houses full of “Circulation”, but with no place “to be”.

So what can we do with this information? If you are building (or dreaming of building) a new house, you should identify every space as either a “Being in” place or a “going through” place. If the places where you had hoped to connect, be at peace, be one, concentrate, create, however you want to fill that in, turn out to be “going through” places, you will have to go back to the drawing board. It truly is as simple as that.

Most of us have to deal with the house we have. However, solving these problems in existing houses does not have to be difficult. Of course the knee jerk response, and not always a bad one, would be to create more dead-end spaces in your house by closing off doors. You can try this out by hanging a nice cloth over on both sides of the door you are thinking of closing off and see how you like it. In some cases this may compromise the traffic too much; it gets too hard to reach certain spaces. Sometimes people have, as a function of “uniformity” or “simplicity” regular doors on spaces that are actually closets. It would be wise to change those doors that look like closet doors, even if it is a walk-in closet. A simple way of doing this is by splitting a 3 foot door vertically into two smaller doors that either swing or just open out.

There are other ways to create dead-end “Being in” spaces. Although few of us really think about office cubicles with nostalgia, that is exactly how office buildings provide places for people to “Be” (productive). I am not advocating turning your house into an office space, but the creative use of half-walls, or “Pony walls,” can help you separate the “going through” from the “being in”. The great advantage of a pony wall is that you create more comfortable spaces to be in, without changing the perception of size of the room that you are in. The setting can become more intimate without feeling cramped. The pony walls can be very thin and even transparent in the form of cloth on a light wooden frame, or planters. Standard drywall on a 2×2 frame would work fine but may be a missed opportunity to give some character to a space. This would be a great opportunity to build a small cob wall in your house! You could also consider bamboo, reed mats, aquariums, red brick or rustic stone. If you have a walkway behind a seat, table or couch, simply raise a small wall behind it and you’ll be amazed by the improvement.

I think the main reason my parents had curtains in their house was because, well, that’s what everyone did. Houses were supposed to have curtains, anything else just wouldn’t have made sense!  The practical reason to have curtains is because they keep the house warmer. In the winter time, most of the heat leaves the house through the ceiling and the windows. Thick wool curtains over the windows can help you give the house the “sweater” it needs.   These days most people have mini (or “Venetian”) blinds over their windows.  While these might help keep a little heat in, the following experiment can show you just how much: On a cold winter day, take off all your clothes and wrap your self in some mini blinds. Step outside and see what you feel. Then repeat the experiment with a heavy wool curtain. Note the difference!

Curtains can also keep the heat out. If your windows let in a lot of sun in the summer, your house can quickly overheat. Closing the curtains can trap that heat in between the glass and the curtain material. In the case of consistent heat and sun penetration, you would be better off protecting the window on the outside of the house, with window shutters, “external” curtains, or shade cloth.

As the night encroaches on us, curtains help us feel safe. Even though windows have glass in them, we still experience them as holes in the wall. They tend to be much weaker than the actual wall of the house and therefore can make us feel less safe and more vulnerable on a subconscious level. More directly, with the light on inside and the darkness outside, we can’t see what is happening outside, while everyone walking by the house can see inside. The reverse is true during the day, which is a lot more comfortable. People like to be able to see what is going on outside the house, hence the popularity of motion detector-lights.

With the introduction of dual-pane glass, houses that were located along noisy streets suddenly became a lot quieter.  Adding a curtain can significantly reduce the amount of un-wanted outside noise that you hear inside. The introduction of all that cloth in your house also improves the sound quality within your house. Conversations are easier, rooms are less “echoey,” hums and buzzes are less prominent. If you play music, the sound will be “more true” as it does not bounce around the house so much. If you have difficulty hearing, you will find a house with lots of soft materials inside a welcome relief. We all know the difference of the quality of the sound we hear walking through a completely empty house, especially if it has high ceilings, lots of glass and hardwood floors. It sounds hollow and it is tiring to have a conversation or to listen to music.

When my father turned 81 I had organized a special dinner for him. I flew across the ocean back to the Netherlands, as did my youngest brother who then lived in Dubai. We had made reservations in a nice restaurant for him and his wife and his 4 sons. It had been 10 years since we had all been together. Unfortunately, the restaurant had a 30 foot ceiling and hard, rectilinear surfaces all around. The windows did not have curtains so that people on the street could look inside the restaurant. It was nearly impossible to have a conversation. There are several restaurants in my home town with the same problem and I avoid them. For me conversation is at least as important as the food. If you have a restaurant like that, try to bring in as many soft materials as possible, perhaps in the form of curtains. You don’t even have to hang them in front of the windows. They just function as sound dampeners. Everyone working in the restaurant will love it as well because they won’t have to yell all night long…

Visually, a curtain does several things. In the first place, it gets rid of all those shiny black “mirrors” that your windows will turn into once it is dark outside. I find this mirror effect to be a distraction and even a little erie. Secondly, the color of your cloth can create a nice contrast with the rest of the house. Even, or maybe especially, if your house is painted white, curtains can really help to liven up a room. Thirdly, whether opened or closed, the waves and creases in the curtain provide patterns of “repetition with variation”, which in combination with the fact that there is always a slight movement in a curtain, gives you the feeling of aliveness. A door opens, someone walks by, a breeze comes through the window, the curtain will notice it and you will notice the curtain. Hence you are connecting with these, often very subtle, events.

Lastly, the curtains frame the windows, especially during the day.  This will draw more attention to them, and what is outside, helping us to connect with the outside world.  Even if you don’t have the most beautiful view outside, framing a window makes it look more special and attractive than it would without the curtains.

A final advantage to curtains over mini-blinds or shades is that you can make them yourself!  A few hours with a sewing machine is all it will take to outfit your whole house with curtains in the colors of your choosing.  In addition to saving money, you’ll have the satisfaction of looking every day at something you made.

This winter we are engaged in the planning process for a major outreach project on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where we intend to build a small 2 bedroom house.  This exciting project will challenge us on many levels: technologically, logistically, and financially.  In the months ahead we will be working on creative solutions to meet these challenges, as well as asking our friends and supporters for  help (more on that later…).

The Pine Ridge Reservation is the ancestral home of the Lakota Nation.  While visually striking, it is a challenging place to live.  Summer temperatures regularly rise over 100 degrees, while winter-time temperatures drop well below zero.  High winds and intense rains are possible any time of year.  In addition to the environmental challenges, the Lakota people also face a host of serious social challenges: unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, obesity, depression, and more.  It is estimated that 80% of the Lakota people are homeless and must rely on relatives for housing during the winter months.

The need for warm housing on the reservation is clear.  But it will have to be more than just warm; it will have to be comfortable, beautiful, energy efficient, require very little maintenance and most importantly be very low-cost.  Our organization and building practices are a perfect match for providing high-quality housing in areas of extreme need for a fraction of the cost of similar “development projects.”  The savings will come from several areas.

1) Overhead: House Alive has almost no overhead costs. We have no office building, and we answer the phone ourselves. (Try it out, give us a call, you may get one of my children on the phone!).  We don’t produce glossy publications, we design and maintain our website ourselves.  Thus we spend very little on typical “business” expenses.

2) Land:  For any house, the land costs represent a significant portion (if not the majority) of the total cost.  On the reservation, Lakota people “own the land out right” as they have for thousands of years. So, we won’t need to pay for land!

3) Permits:  Building permits can cost many thousands of dollars, depending on your location.  On the reservation there are no building codes or code officials, and thus no permits are required.  Also building codes make buildings more expensive.  In my own house, which cost about $50,000 to build (in 2001), I estimate that about $8000 went towards fulfilling requirements for the code officials that were not strictly necessary for the safety or comfort of the building.

4) Labor:  On most conventional projects, labor expenses make up at least half of the total cost.  For this project, most of the labor will come from workshop participants, apprentices, and volunteers.

5) Materials: The principles of Natural Building (using locally available or scavenged materials) combined with freedom from building codes allow us to be very creative with material use. We can use natural and recycled materials such as earth and straw that may not be engineered to pass building codes, but will work well for our purposes. Internal cob walls (free) will be sculpted to “form-fit” every room in the house; the foundation will be made from scavenged (free) concrete chunks  and earthbags; doors and windows will be reclaimed from local renovation jobs; the ceiling will be made out of chicken wire and cob (a House Alive specialty) instead of  drywall, tape, and paint.

6) Energy efficiency: For any building, the cost of heating and cooling the building over its lifetime will match or exceed the original building costs.  Thus it is crucial that we do everything possible to keep the building affordable over its lifetime, by making it highly energy efficient.  This is accomplished by using passive solar design, thermal mass, and insulation.  We will use a double-wall system with insulation between for the cob walls (a House Alive original!), straw-bales for the North (coldest) wall, and lots of insulation in the ceiling where most heat is lost (heat rises!).

7) Health and maintenance:  In addition to being efficient, the building cannot make people sick or require lots of money to maintain.  Too many development projects focus on using low cost, often toxic, building materials which cause health problems for their inhabitants.  Additionally, we expect there to be a high level of moisture in the house, as there could be 10 to 20 people living in it during the winter.  Clay walls and ceiling will help to moderate humidity by absorbing excess moisture and allowing it to pass easily into the roof vents.  We expect this to reduce the risk of mold growth, another common (and potentially hazardous) problem.  The building will be designed for low-maintenance, by keeping it simple and well-protected from the elements.

In spite of our best efforts to keep the costs down, we will have to spend money on this project.  A huge chunk of our cost will go into the roof and insulation. We are planning on installing a “life-time” metal roof instead of using asphalt shingles (10-20 yrs). We plan to use roofing sheets that are left-overs from big jobs that we can mix and match (colors may vary…). Our shopping list also includes copper wire for electricity, wood for door frames and the roof, rocks and sand, insulation, straw bales, and more. Finally we have the travel and logistical costs of facilitating a project more than 1,500 miles from home.

We are excited about this project, but also daunted by the challenges that are ahead of us.  Workshop fees alone will not be enough to cover the costs of this ambitious project, and thus we are working to raise $15,000 to help offset the material and logistical costs.  Considering the size and scale of the project, this would work out about $25/sq ft, where most custom homes cost $200/sq ft and up.

And while we believe that this project will be a success, we don’t think this is the solution for providing housing and jobs, and improving the health and happiness of a group of people that have been violently repressed for 200 years. But we do hope that it will offer a small kernal in place that badly needs it.  As the old saying goes, if you throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick!

Over the past 8 years, House Alive has touched and been touched by so many workshop participants, apprentices, or just visitors to our homestead, who have seen first-hand what cob and natural buildings look like.  The support and enthusiasm of all of these people has given us the courage to take on this major project; now we are asking these people — and you — to help make this project a success. We invite you to help us create much needed shelter for our native people in the poorest part of our country.  With your generous donation, we can  bring this exciting project to a positive conclusion.

Donate to the Pine Ridge Project! Thanks for your support.

This year’s event drew people from all over North America, including Ontario, Vermont, Mexico, New Mexico, and of course the Pacific Northwest. People shared pictures of their work and shared new techniques, as well as discussed the challenges facing the both movement and the world.

As attendees and co-organizers of the event, we were very impressed by the high-quality work that was on display, as well as the efforts people are making to bring natural building out of the “Back woods” and into the public eye. Many kinds of natural building techniques were represented, from an earthbag orphanage in El Salvador to a museum in Canada using almost every material imaginable. Without exception everything we saw was both beautiful and functional, a testament to the materials and the builders. It struck us that many of the projects we learned about would have been earth-shattering 15 years ago, but now are almost “Common place.” This speaks volumes about how much the natural building movement has grown over the last decade, and is a sign of what the future holds.

We were also impressed to see how much work is being done to make natural building more accessible in places with restrictive building codes. On a national level, Tony Novelli and David Eisenberg at the Development Center for Appropriate Technology (DCAT) continue their tireless work to convince building officials around the country that part of their responsibility in ensuring the health and safety of buildings should include considering the health of the planet. On a more local level, natural building advocates in Portland have helped to create a committee to help get natural building projects through the permitting process. The committee, called the Alternative Technology Advisory Committee (ATAC) is working with builders and homeowners to permit a range of projects, from load-bearing cob and straw bale to rocket stoves. And in the Bay Area, a group of women builders has managed to convince the city of El Sorbante (outside of Oakland) to grant them a permit for a light-straw clay infill retro-fit.

There were a number of attendees who have been successfully working as plasterers and artists using natural plasters and paints. They shared pictures of their stunning work as well as new “tricks of the trade,” in the spirit of cooperation and community. There is obviously a growing market for the beauty, ease, and environmental advantages of using earth as a building material.

A significant amount of discussion took place with regard to our changing world: There was a general sense that, with a new economic reality, a changing energy landscape and the threat of climate change, natural builders will be called upon more and more to provide sensible solutions to address these problems.

Needless to say that there were also many casual conversations, new friendships formed, music played and community created. As in previous events, these moments were often the most valuable and memorable ones, a good reminder of the importance of connecting with those around us and having fun. As our “organization” has a slightly anarchistic streak, there are no plans for a colloquium next year; however, they always seem to happen anyway…

It was very large, perhaps 2 acres, and stood in the middle of nowhere.  There was no clear entrance or front door, nor were there lit up names or giant vinyl posters, indicating whose building this was.  It appeared to be no more than 2 stories tall. All around the building were black, reflective windows, about 2 feet high and 4 feet long. This would be a reasonable size windows for a regular house, but they were tiny for this huge building. I also suspect that they were non-openable windows.  On a previous trip to visit the same friends, I saw a similar building outside of Carson City, Nevada. My friend told me that it was a hospital.

My mind started to guess about this most recent building. I eventually narrowed it down to 3 possibilities: It was either a prison, a school, or a hospital. I think that all 3 were a good possibility as I have seen a lot of schools, hospitals and prisons that looked somewhat like the building I passed that evening in Reno…

This was a really disturbing observation for me. In my mind I started to analyze what this could possibly mean. On the positive side, maybe this meant that buildings and design don’t really matter. Whether you are a correctional facility, want to heal or educate, as long as you have a roof over your head and the right people and technologies on the inside, things will work out just fine. However, I highly doubt that this is true. On the contrary, the built environment touches us in every way. The qualities of sound, space and light influence how we feel, how we function and how we relate to other people.

A more cynical conclusion could be that the people who commission architects to design these buildings, as well as the architects themselves, actually do not know much about how buildings can influence people. Perhaps their primary concern is money or ego. In that case they are not doing themselves a favor as they are cursed with a building that does nothing for healing, educating or correcting behavior. The architects are doing themselves a financial favor but should feel no better about their work then a jet skier on a beautiful lake: They shamelessly influence the public space but get away with it because there are no legal ramifications.

We can even go one step further and move into the conspiratorial realm. Perhaps the powers at be are not only not interested in
healing, educating or correcting behavior, they actually hope it won’t happen. It’s hard to image that anybody would think that the average city school is a good learning environment or that teaching kids to pass a test has anything to to with learning. The government has always been interested in “schooling”, but never in “education”. The same could be said for prisons. We are imprisoning people, not correcting people’s behavior. And how about hospitals? Are they about health and healing, or more about procedures and drugs?  I think in many ways the buildings symbolize the inability of these institutions to be true to task.

Back to design. The dreadful thing is that we are now so used to this hideous form of architecture that we seem to not care anymore.  It is not just the prison, schools and hospitals; it’s all the strip malls, offices, malls, and so on, and so on. The fact that we are used to it does not mean that it does not effect us. On the contrary, I believe it is cancer for the soul to live in a world that is designed the way “modern america” is. The built environment as we know it demotivates us for life, sucks energy out of us and robs us from the opportunity to experience beauty and connection. Anybody who has visited an intact European inner city can attest to the stark difference with the American modern architecture. (Having said that, the modern landscape in europe is also rapidly changing to an unexplainable ugly “modernism”…) If nothing else, the American modern building style will create people that will design more of the same.

We can get used to things and experience them as not bothersome.  However, I believe that this is simply a mechanism of the body and soul to not have us deal with the offensive structures on a conscious level.  I think they eat away at us on an unconscious level.  This is often noticed by people who live in cob buildings when they enter a “conventional” building; They experience it as foreign and “wrong”.  The opposite is not true; people that walk for the first time into a cob building most often feel a sigh of relief; they experience a true “home coming”.

PS- Right after I had finished writing this article, a woman visited us who said that she used to work for a commercial architect firm. However, she quit because it was too boring. “All we did was design schools and prisons”, she said. How about that!

There is no dock in La Union.  The lanchas float in the shallow bay, and to get to them you must take off your shoes and wade out.  All the supplies must be brought out this way, too.  As I sat in the lancha waiting to leave, I observed a dozen men bringing out boxes and sacks on their shoulders full of supplies.  They each made several trips, carrying heavy loads.

There was also a little floating cart that could be used to bring out heaver items.  As I watched, men brought bags filled with sand to the lancha, 30 in all, each weighing well over 100 pounds.  Then they brought 10 bags of Portland cement, again at over 100 lbs each.  On a neighboring lancha they loaded several hundred cement blocks in a similar manner.  All these building materials would then of course have to be unloaded on the other side.

These lanchas were not designed for freight.  They more resemble a speed-boat than a barge, and are primarily used by the locals as fishing boats.  They have high sides, so everything has to be lifted up and over.  It is hard to describe just how much work went into getting these incredibly heavy materials onto the boat, and then off it again!

On the journey to the island I met two men who worked for a government agency responsible for building housing for the poor.  They were currently involved in a project to build 40 houses on the island for people who currently had none.  The recipients of the houses were required to help during the construction of the houses, and afterwords they would receive one to live in at no cost.  The manager of the project, Walter, invited me to watch them unload the boat that was bringing materials later in the day.

This large-scale government project had a bit more money and a bit more clout, so they were able to hire a large barge to bring over nearly 1800 concrete blocks.  (Interestingly the boat was an old World War II troop transport boat, the kind used during the invasion at Normandy.)  It arrived at about 3 pm and the “beneficiarios” (families who were helping and would receive houses) were there to meet it.  Each block had to be carried off the boat and stacked on the pier by hand.  There were about 30 or 40 people helping, including young kids, mothers, fathers, and old men.  They would each carry a different amount of blocks depending on their size and strength.  Eventually people started dropping off for longer and longer breaks.  I wondered if others were getting frustrated, feeling like not everyone was doing their fair share. The work continued on this way for at least an hour, and they were not  even half way through the pile.  I finally left, feeling pretty guilty that I hadn’t helped move 1 block.

Later that evening I ran into the group of helpers carrying blocks from the dock up the hill and into the village.  There were only two cars on the island and apparently neither was available to help!  It was at least 1/2 mile walk, most of it uphill.  I don’t know if they planned to carry all the blocks that way, but if they did it would take days simply to get the materials to the building sites.

I visited one of the houses they were building.  It was very small and square, probably about 150 sq ft, with a door and a couple of windows.  It was entirely made of concrete, with a  metal roof.   From my perspective it seemed like an unpleasant place to live, more like a  prison cell than a home.  But the beneficarios seemed  quite happy, and  were obviously willing to do a huge amount of work to  have one of their own.

I kept trying to think how natural building could help here.  Wouldn’t it have been simplier to make adobe bricks out of local soil, assuming it was suitable (I didn’t do any soil tests)?  Rocks seemed to be abundant on the island; certainly a skilled mason could have built a stone house?  Or couldn’t lighter-weight materials have been brought to the island, like bamboo or even wood?

In situations like these there are so many complex factors that make seemingly simple solutions like these difficult to achieve.  One factor is the concern people in this area (and throughout much of Latin America) have about safety: they want a building that no one can break in to.  This requires a sturdy structure like concrete and rules out something more light-weight like bamboo or waddle and daub.  Of course stone and even adobe or cob would provide this sense of security, but there are other factors in play.  One is the common feeling that earth houses are a symbol of poverty.  Thus a gift of an earthen house from the Government might not be received with such enthusiasm.  Another concern is for seismic activity.  All of Central America is seismically active, sometimes with pretty significant shakes.  If the government is giving people houses, it wants to be certain that they will not fall down on the recipients.  The engineers and architects have knowledge of and confidence in concrete block houses.  Even though empirical evidence has shown that earthen houses can also survive strong earthquakes, there simply isn’t the scientific data to back it up.

There may be political factors at play as well.  In Mexico, for example, there is a government program to put cement floors in every house in the country (many of the houses in rural areas have earth floors).  President Calderon describes this “Firm Floor Program” as follows:

“We are going to make the greatest effort ever in Mexican history to take this step, and to bring people out of the poverty that involves sleeping on a dirt floor, so that they will be able to sleep on a concrete floor where children will at least be protected from disease, dust and scorpions.”

I’m not an expert on the subject, but I don’t know how a concrete floor will protect people from disease and scorpions.  It is probably not a coincidence, though, that the cement company Cemex, one of Mexico’s largest companies, is currently struggling what with falling home construction and political problems with one of their plants in Venezuela.  The government’s program to give everyone in the country a firm floor is almost certainly intended to help firm up the finances of Cemex, too.  It is entirely possible that something similar could be at play in El Salvador.

There are more reasons still why this project on Isle de Meanguera plays out the way it does.  In order to build 40 houses in a 6 month time period, they need to be easily replicable and built quickly.  Modern industrial building products are well suited to those criteria.  And finally, if and when the buildings need maintenance the government agency can be confident that someone on the Island or in nearby La Union will be familiar with concrete construction and could perform any needed repairs.

With so many pressures against a more natural approach, it is hard to imagine a project of this nature happening any other way.  But what if it did?  What if the government put the resources it is currently using to build the concrete block houses into teaching natural building?  Would it not be possible to bring a crew of builders, teach several more on the island how to make adobe bricks or mix cob, and then engage in a massive building project on the scale that they are currently doing?

This approach would have several advantages.  First it would be much more environmentally sustainable.  The embodied energy of the imported cement-based building products is huge, when you consider first the energy required to make the cement and then the energy required to bring it to the island.  Second it would likely be cheaper, at least in the long run.  While there might be more up-front costs in training builders, ultimately they would no longer have to bring expensive materials from the mainland.  And lastly, it would make the islanders more self-sufficient.  With the knowledge of how to make comfortable shelters from the materials under their feet, they would not be reliant on government agencies for housing for the next generation.

The government program is obviously well intentioned, and is providing immediate housing for people who truly need it.  But to borrow from a famous expression, give a man a house, and he has shelter until it falls down; teach a man to build a house, and he will have shelter forever.  I truly believe that over the long run the people on Isle de Meangueara would benefit more from learning how to use the materials around them to build shelter, rather than relying on the support of the government and the building industry.  Will the children of the “beneficiarios” be able to count on government aid to build their houses too?  A program focused on using local resources for building would ultimately be less expensive, less energy-intensive, and would give the islanders a chance for long-term independence.

The core of the problem is that building a house is, well… very hard. It is not very often that people express that the building of their house was easier, cheaper and took less time then they originally thought. More likely is that it will cost twice as much and take twice as long as planned. To do embark on such project with a romantic partner is at best a risky undertaking.

The problem often starts with the fact that building the house was actually something that only one person really wanted to do. The other person just tried to be supportive. That in it of itself does not have to be a bad thing, as long as it is understood what is going on. Worse, however is when the project is started to try and “rescue” a relationship that is heading for the cliffs. Taking on a large project like a house can be a real distraction from fundamental problems in the relationship.

But let’s say the couple has a solid relationship, the choice of building a house was well reasoned and thought through, and there seems to be enough skills, time and money available to take on the challenge of building of a house. Even in this almost ideal case trouble may arise, caused by several rather dynamic forces.

First, you will have to make thousands of decisions together. Everything from the size of the deck to the color of the kitchen counter tiles is up to the two of you. Do you have the same taste? What areas do you care about the most? Where are you willing to compromise?

Second, even with the best of planning building a house is a financial strain. This will make the choices about the house even more complicated. Who is willing to spend more money on the house in order to satisfy his or her taste? And how much money will be left for an occasional movie, vacation, or dinner?

Third, the time that used to be spent having fun together is now going to be spent building the house. What time is left to go on hikes together, sleep in and go out for coffee? How much energy do you have left in the evening for watching a movie, drinking a glass of wine, or making love?

And last but not least, male and female energy can complement each other, but they can also clash. The male energy tends to want to get things done with less eye for beauty and detail. In most societies the males are the “house builders”, which can cause a power struggle in the decision making processes. The male may claim to have more expertise, even though this may just be imaginary. “That is just the way it’s done” may be a typical male defense for making some decisions.

Of course, building a house together can also be an absolute thrill, the highlight of your life which solidifies an already strong relationship. If at the end you are still financially solvent, your back still feels good, you love your house and you can still laugh together, you have done fantastically well. Here are some tips to help you achieve this:

• Practice “consensus decision making.” That means that all involved agree, and no one strongly disagrees. Also, if appropriate, determine which areas of the house you each care about most. Maybe your partner has no interest in helping you make decisions about certain areas, and vice versa.
• Determine how much house you really need. Don’t go to the financial edge, it’s not worth it! Keep it smaller and simpler. There is zero correlation between expensive homes and happiness (if anything, I imagine it would be a negative correlation).
• Set scheduled time aside for fun. If you don’t do this, your entire emotional life and relationship will be gobbled up by the building process.
• Don’t hurt yourself. A slipped disk or a couple of missing fingers can haunt you for the rest of your life. Use natural building techniques, be well rested (especially when using power tools), get help!!! Make your house building process so that it is strength and health building. Our natual building workshops will help you understand how to make that a reality.
• If you have the opportunity, do a small “practice project” together. Build a garage, a studio, a bath house or tool-shed and see how that goes. If this mini-project ends up being an experience full of tension, consider that a red flag. Doing this will also help you to sharpen skills, judge size, time and physical abilities.
• This brings me to one of the harder thing to clearly articulate as one of the most essential parts of natural building. If your life has become about the house, you have gone too far. Life is about relationships, people, community, and connections. Houses should be a means toward these ends, not a distraction from them.
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