Reading: Cob and Natural Housing

One of the most popular and beautiful books on cob home building, by the hard-working pioneers of the revival of cob in contemporary times. Extensive explanations, illustrations and photos show you how test your site's soil, create cob and make it into walls, allowing for doors, windows, and plumbing, types of roofing suitable for cob, and finishing touches. This is more than a just a how-to book, though - one chapter invites you to redefine "house" so you'll start off in the right direction, and others cover in detail proper site selection and preparation, where foresight may make a bigger difference than any of the actual cob work.

Beautiful color plates are a treat in the center of the book, and always elicit favorable comments from anyone to whom i show this part of the book. Electrical and water system are discussed but not dealt with in depth, since other books cover these topics which apply as well to other types of natural homes. Hand-Sculpted House includes interviews with cob home builders and residents. The authors tell their own stories of how they came to cob.

A shorter, yet long enough, earthy and practical guide to doing cob.

After building the main structure of your natural materials home, you'll want to apply finishing touches that are just as natural. Natural earth plasters to protect and beautify the inside and outside of your home can be made inexpensively from local resources, colored, and textured in many creative ways. This book explains the types of earth plasters, silica paint, lime washes and other finish materials, how to make them, ways of applying them and their care, with many pictures and diagrams including a beautiful set of color images in the middle of the book. They show you what tools and other things to get. While applicable to nearly all kinds of natural constraction, special attention is given to straw bale and rammed earth walls. They explain considerations of climate. Unless you are already expert in the topic, this is an essential book for the final phases of building your natural home.

This well-written, inspiring book explains the general principles of natural houses and then explores several particular types,dedicating a chapter each to straw bale, Earthships, adobe, cob and others. The book finishes with chapters covering heating, electrical and water systems, and the natural "green" materials avialable today. The chapter on cob is excellent and gives the reader a good idea what it is, its advantages and disadvantages. The photographs and illustrations are clear. There's also an interview with Ianto Evans, one of the pioneers in bring back cob constrution to the US in our time. While the cob chapter is rich in detail and tips, the serious cobber-to-be will want to peruse a full book on the topic or even better, attend a workshop. The Natural House is an excellent introduction for those just starting in cob, needing an overview of the subject, or undecided between the various natural bulding techniques.

A collection of shorter writings that will take you on an amazing architectural trip that visits a hospital that patients actually find healing, stone salamanders, artificial Christmas trees, the Fuegians, Berlin, Santa Barbara, the education of architects, and of course the capital city of Oz. Why was it made of emerald? We have ancient myths involving iron, bronze, wood, stone, but not plastic - is that only because plastic is (obviously) too recent? What writer on architecture would explore such questions? Good book for a big-picture, several-steps-back overview of what it's all about.

This magnum opus of four volumes, called the Nature of Order, by the architect who wrote A Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language extends the work begun those initial books. (And further volumes are in preparation...) Beginning with the observation that certain places, buildings, street scenes, bridges and even boats, furniture and cups, have a certain hard-to-name quality lacking in most of their modern siblings, the Nature of Order explores why this so. What is is this quality, which Alexander refers to as "life", what is the difference between living and non-living structures, and more importantly, can we add this quality in a practical way to the things we build?

Many photographs illustrate the idea he calls "centers" and fifteen properties of living structure. Though never straying far from architecture, the writing is often philosophical and at the same time grounded in experience and real building projects. The ideas are general, applicable to other arts, but always focused on the making of pleasing homes and offices.

One day, a friend of mine on the phone was feeling bummed out about all the bland rat-box housing developments sprouting up all over the (pick any US city) area. One of the Nature of Order volumes happened to be nearby, and without much effort found a nice section on the beauty of dewdrops. I read this out loud over the phone and that cheered up my friend. Then some cannibals ate her. (just checking to see if anyone really reads any of this.) These books are full of good hope, peace, beauty and inspiring examples.

I would like to plagarize the caption to one photo in volume III: "The blissful state: my wife, in our kitchen. I have no doubt at all that this translucent smile, this happy reflectiveness, was able to arise in her because of the nature of the surrounding: an ordinary kitchen, which i made not for magazines, but in a way to make our family as comfortable as possible. It is not possible, I think, to separate the life of the environment -- its untidy geometric ordinariness and organization -- from the beauty of that sleepy smile which arose in her."

The books are large and heavy but not unreasonably so. They are pricey mostly, i suspect, because they are provided through a small specialized publisher without the economics of scale that a large slick publishing company could provide.

Due to some publishing quirk, volume III came out after volume IV.

Sounding like a great title for an historical or science fiction novel, perhaps - Ancient Sunlight refers to the fossil fuels we burn and use in mass quantities every day.