My love affair with cob continues. Not only did my growing adeptness at building with it empower me to rip my garage door off and construct a wall in its place, it encouraged me, last fall, to completely transform the façade of my house by turning the concrete slab leading to my front door into a porch-like chamber with an arch over the entrance. Unfortunately, one of the (very minor) drawbacks of cob is that it shrinks quite a bit as it’s drying, and while I was working on the wall of the garage on Sunday I was informed by my most dedicated cobbing assistant, Ms. N, that a large crack had formed in the arch, one big enough to put its structural integrity into doubt.
Once again, I was forced to alter my plans in response to events beyond my control. I immediately switched gears and start plastering the arch, a project I’d been putting off for months. It went fairly quickly. Evidently, I’m getting better at it, but it’s still a chore compared to cobbing. The biggest difference is the materials you use. Cob is a mixture of sand, clay, and straw, three of the most user-friendly materials you’re ever going to see, while plaster involves the use of lime, the stuff Mobsters sprinkle over dead bodies to hasten their decomposition. The stuff bubbles when you add water to it and can burn your skin so you need to wear thick rubber gloves when slapping it on. And you need to beware of getting it in your eyes. And it’s not good to breathe in the powder when you’re mixing up a batch either. All of this adds just enough stress to the process to make it a lot less fun than cobbing. The worst thing that can happen when you’re cobbing is you might step on a pebble and hurt your foot.
You’ll notice in the picture that the arch is far from being perfectly round. I actually embrace such imperfections. It shows that a real human constructed it. I find the perfect straight lines found in most modern architecture to be boring. In the cob wall that supports the arch I added a screen window, several oddly shaped glass windows, and a couple niches. The ability to add these sorts of design elements is what makes cob so thrilling to me. That the process of making it emits almost no greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is an added bonus.
Until just a few years ago, few people realized that our buildings, not our cars, were one of the main causes of global warning. Then in 2004, Edward Mazria, an architect from Santa Fe best known for his 1979 book, The Passive Solar Energy Book, made a shocking announcement: automobiles only accounted for about 6.5 percent of the energy consumption in the U.S. while buildings consumed over 40 percent of the energy and emitted 50 percent of the greenhouse gases.
Is it too mawkish of me to say that learning how to cob changed my life, that it made it better, that if everyone used it to build their houses our planet would be in infinitely healthier? Probably, but I’m saying it anyway.
Self-Sufficiency Meter: 31%
