My parents taught me that doing physical labor was something to be left for poor and/or uneducated people. In other words, “you better do well in school, otherwise you may be stuck digging holes for the rest of your life.” A life of farming, road building, coal mining or truck driving was simply not a reasonable option for me, according to my parents. In many ways, I think they were right: there are a lot of demeaning, damaging, monotonous jobs out there, that I’d rather not do for a living. However, it also instilled in me the general principle that “doing physical labor” is something to be avoided.

But what if the labor becomes so pleasurable, so health giving, so rhythmic, so full of joy, that you actually want to do it? “Labor intensive” would then be considered a positive statement. Why would you want to do less of something you enjoy! This is the overwhelming experience of the people who build with cob, assuming they have given themselves the time it takes to build by hand and foot.

Which leeds me to the next issue, that of time. Our obsession with speed and getting things done gets in our way of living our lives. Why? Because we are never done! Once your house is done you will move on to the next thing that needs to get done. “Being done” is an illusion, rather than an absolute thing. If enjoyed, the time spent cobbing a building together, is time well spent!

Aside from these philosophical considerations, it is valuable to look at the practicality of building by hand and foot. By harvesting and processing our own building materials, we do the work which the lumber mill (and scores of other factories) do for the conventional builder at a financial cost. If those builders had to go out into the  woods and make their own 2×6 lumber, cob may not seem that labor intensive anymore. Many cob builders enjoy having time rather than money and use that time to hand-build their house.

In this process, it is more likely that the house will be “crafted”, rather than “assembled” (or stapled together) as is the case with conventional building. Consequently, cob houses tend to be more creative, beautiful, and loved. Craftsmanship in the conventional building world comes at a high price; with cobbing, novice builders can be craftspeople as the wall goes up.

The “de-industrialization” of the building process also means that the we can pay closer attention to the impact we have on the earth. The harvesting of materials can be done locally and carefully. The labor intensive methods become a key ingredient toward sustainability and care for the earth. Lastly, many hands make light work. Often people imagine that they are alone in the world and therefore have to be able to do everything by themselves. This is a choice, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Building with cob is an invitation for people to connect with one another by building together.

So, the stigma that the term “labor intensive” has, may not serve us well. In fact,  I think that we should seek out more labor intensive activities and crafts rather than less. Labor can bring us health, beauty and community and reduce our dependency on oil and industry. Of course, with enough machines and diesel fuel, I can cob any size house in the same time as the conventional builder staples his or hers together. But why would I?

By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY and JOHNNY DEPP

The legend of Woody Guthrie as folk singer is firmly etched in America’s collective consciousness. Compositions like “Deportee,” “Pastures of Plenty” and “Pretty Boy Floyd” have become national treasures akin to Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack” and Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” But Guthrie, who would have been 100 years old on July 14, was also a brilliant and distinctive prose stylist, whose writing is distinguished by a homespun authenticity, deep-seated purpose and remarkable ear for dialect. These attributes are on vivid display in Guthrie’s long-lost “House of Earth,” his only fully realized, but yet unpublished, novel. (His other books, “Bound for Glory” and “Seeds of Man,” are quasi-fictional memoirs.)

“House of Earth” was written as a direct response to the Dust Bowl. In December 1936 the rambling troubadour had an epiphany while busking for tips in New Mexico. He’d traveled there after a treacherous duster whacked the Texas Panhandle town of Pampa, where he’d been living in poverty. While in New Mexico, Guthrie became transfixed by an adobe hacienda’s sturdy rain spouts and soil-straw bricks, a simple yet solid weatherproof structure unlike most of his Texan friends’ homes, which were poorly constructed with flimsy wooden boards and cheap nails.

An immediate convert, Guthrie purchased a nickel pamphlet, “Adobe or Sun-Dried Brick for Farm Buildings,” from the United States Department of Agriculture. The manual instructed poor rural folk on building adobe homes from the cellar up. All an amateur needed was a home-brew of clay loam, straw and water. Guthrie promoted this U.S.D.A. guide with wild-eyed zeal. Adobes, he boasted, would endure the Dust Bowl better than wooden aboveground structures that were vulnerable to wind, snow, dust and termites. If sharecroppers and tenant farmers could only own a piece of land — even the uncultivable territory of arroyos and red rocks — they could build a “house of earth” that would protect them from dirt blowing in through cracks in the walls.

In the late 1930s, a winter sleet crippled the Dust Bowl region; The New York Times called it “a blizzard of frozen mud,” the color of “cocoa.” Visibility was often less than 200 feet. “Well Howdy,” Guthrie wrote to his actor friend Eddie Albert in Hollywood in a letter from Pampa written during that period. “We didn’t have no trouble finding the dust bowl, and are about as covered up as one family can get. Only trouble is the dust is so froze up it cain’t blow, so it just scrapes around.” Stuck in his Pampa shack, trying to protect his baby girl from a fever, Guthrie dreamed about insulating his family from the cold. “You dig you a cellar and mix the mud and straw right in there, sorta with your feet, you know, and you get the mud just the right thickness, and you put in a mould, and you mould out around 20 bricks a day,” Guthrie wrote, “and in a reasonable length of time you have got enough to build your house.”

Guthrie’s Dust Bowl experiences, along with his reading “Grapes of Wrath” and the writing of “This Land Is Your Land,” formed the roots of what would become “House of Earth.” Guthrie conceived of “This Land Is Your Land” while hitchhiking to New York. When he heard Irving Berlin’s sentimental “God Bless America” performed ad nauseam on radio stations, he decided to write a rebuttal. On Feb. 23, 1940, holed up in a low-rent Times Square hotel, he wrote the now iconic song, including radical verses, later changed, like the one below:By the relief office I saw my people.As they stood hungry,I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.Endemic poverty is a theme that Guthrie would turn to full-bore in “House of Earth.”

The narrative follows the lives of two hardscrabble farmers, Tike and Ella May Hamlin, living in the cap rock country of West Texas, “that big high, crooked cliff of limestone, sandrock, marble and flint, that runs between and is the line that divides the lower west Texas plains from the upper north Panhandle plains.” The impoverished couple, it seems, live in biological harmony with the land. A scorching lovemaking scene on a hay bale viscerally represents the fertility ritual. Yet they can’t keep the bizarre weather out of their shabby home, and Tike — Guthrie’s alter ego — starts espousing the gospel of adobe.The deck is stacked against them. Their home is owned by a bank in cahoots with a big lumber company; adobe houses are deemed verboten. In Guthrie’s fierce proletarian worldview, the rural poor are thereby shafted by the iron boot heel of capitalist greed merchants, and he finger-points everyone from bankers to lumbermen to termite-like real estate brokers, enemies of the little guy. At a key juncture, Tike rails against the sheep mentality of honest folks in Texas and Oklahoma who let the capitalist vultures steal from them.

Pitched somewhere between rural realism and proletarian protest, somewhat static in terms of narrative drive, “House of Earth” nonetheless offers a searing portrait of the Panhandle and its marginalized Great Depression residents. Guthrie successfully mixes Steinbeck’s narrative verve with D. H. Lawrence’s openness to erotic exploration. When the Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax read the first chapter he was profoundly impressed. For months Lomax encouraged Guthrie to finish the book, saying he’d “considered dropping everything I was doing” just to get the novel published. “It was quite simply the best material I’d ever seen written about that section of the country,” he wrote.But after finishing the novel in 1947, Guthrie put the manuscript away and concentrated on songwriting. He may have sensed the novel could be considered both passé (post-New Deal writing was frowned upon by cold-war-era critics) and ahead of its time (graphic sex). His fertility cycle prose was so edgy that publication was unlikely. And his use of an overdrawn hillbilly dialogue would have found little embrace in New York literary circles. Apparently, Guthrie never showed anyone other than the filmmaker Irving Lerner the remaining sections of the novel. (He hoped Lerner would use the book as the basis for a movie.)Yet the book’s architectural intensity makes it a minor masterpiece. When we shared the finished novel with Bob Dylan, he was blown away, “surprised by the genius,” he said, of the prose.

At heart, “House of Earth” is a meditation about how poor people search for love and meaning in a corrupt world, one in which the rich have lost their moral compasses. Even though the backdrop is the washed-out agricultural fields of Texas, the novel could just as easily be set in a refugee camp in Sudan or a shantytown in Haiti.In the late 1940s, after “House of Earth” was finished, Guthrie’s health started to deteriorate from complications of Huntington’s disease. While disciples like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Pete Seeger popularized his folk repertory, “House of Earth” languished in a Coney Island closet. But, as Guthrie might say, “All good things in due time.” We recently tracked down a typescript, now held at the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa, and the book will be published next year.Today, Texas is in the midst of a prolonged drought; global warming is a scientific fact; and wildfires, blizzards and tornadoes increasingly ravage the American landscape. The unerring rightness of adobe living is now more apparent than ever. It’s almost as if Guthrie had prophetically written “House of Earth” with the summer of 2012 in mind.

Douglas Brinkley is the author of “Cronkite”; Johnny Depp recently starred in the film “Dark Shadows.” They are editing “House of Earth” for publication next year.

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!