Today, building a modern cob house is the exception to the norm, and it is almost unheard of to build with local materials. for more than 60 years, or in the United States for at least 120 years. By 1985, there hadn’t been a new cob building constructed in the U.K. The perception of cob as “poor people’s housing” led to its near demise. Mass production led to mass marketing and the promotion of these new materials as signs of progress. However, with the industrial age came factories and cheap transportation in the West, making brick, milled wood, cement, and steel readily available. In Yemen, cob buildings stand that are nine stories tall and more than 700 years old. In Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, parts of Asia, and what is now the southwestern United States, cob was developed independently by indigenous people. When the British immigrated to the United States, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1700s and 1800s, they brought the technique with them. In the U.K., tens of thousands of cob buildings are still lived in, some of them more than 500 years old. By age 23, she was mortgage-free and teaching cob-building workshops all over the United States as the “Barefoot Builder.” When her family relocated to the mountains east of Nashville, Tennessee, Ott used her new skills to build a small cob house for just under $8,000. (See DIY Cob-Building Technique, later in this article.) After her initial success with cob, Ott traveled to Oregon to apprentice with the Cob Cottage Company. Cob construction is particularly easy to learn, requires no fancy equipment, uses local materials, and can be done in small batches as time allows - making it extremely accessible to a wide range of people. In places where timber was scarce, the building material most available was often the soil underfoot.īuilding with earth has a long and successful history. Before coal and oil made transportation cheap, houses were built from whatever materials were close at hand. Cob-Building OriginsĬob building gets its name from the Old English term for “lump,” which refers to the lumps of clay-rich soil that were mixed with straw and then stomped into place to create monolithic earthen walls. Christina Ott had discovered cob building. Following Hurricane Lili in 2002, however, the sturdy little building, which had cost just a few hundred dollars and a summer’s labor to build, proved to be one of the few buildings left standing in her neighborhood. Some people predicted Florida’s humid air and torrential rains would melt her “mud hut” back into the ground. Intrigued, she used her savings to travel to Vermont for a five-day workshop, where she learned how to mix clay, sand, and straw by foot, and then knead lumps of the stuff into solid walls nearly as durable as concrete.Īfter returning to Florida, she and some friends used the techniques she had learned to build a small pottery shed in her parents’ backyard. In early 1999, a young woman from Florida happened across an article online about the recent revival of an ancient British method for sculpting dirt houses. Learn modern cob house building for a mortgage-free home using low-cost and local materials by following how to build a cob house step by step. This retreat center’s storage building features an attached cob oven and natural paints.
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