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Archive for “Natural Building” category
Showing results 56 - 60 of 61 for the category: Natural Building.
15 Mar 2006
**Review of Building with Cob – a step-by-step guide. Adam Weisman and Katy Bryce. Green Books. 2006.**
In my work teaching natural building I often found myself using cookery metaphors. Clay plasters need to be mixed to a consistency of cookie dough, clay slip needs to be like a runny yoghurt rather than milk, a good final cob should be like a loaf of bread… people relate to this much more than technical lists of mixes. It gives natural building a familiarity and a resonance that clicks with people, in the same way that Jamie Oliver on telly knocking a 2 minute chocolate mousse together does. The modern cook book is a very different thing from a Mrs Beaton first edition. Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson; the books produced by these celebrity chefs are awash with gorgeous pictures of delicious meals, groovy chefs at work, they make good food beautiful, everyday and relevant.
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10 Mar 2006
This is possibly the single most wonderful things you could do with oil barrels. How about converting them into the most efficient form of space heating imaginable? All for just a few quid? In such a way as to heat the house as well as a beautiful heated cob bench, bed, whatever? I am always drawn towards technology that is simple enought that I can build it, look after it and explain it. The Rocket Stove is potentially one of the greatest inventions of recent years, and one you really should know about. Why there aren’t research facilities full of engineers running around with barrels and cob and making fires to test their amazing new creations is beyond me….
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2 Mar 2006
**Chiel Boonstra** is a Senior Consultant DVH Building and Industry Sustainability Consultants and a specialist in the Passive House model. His lecture focused on the Passive House, which is a concept for a house which requires no space heating at all. Clearly there is a lot that can be learnt from this excellent model which will be needed in post-peak housing. However, there is a catch.
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27 Feb 2006
Amid the ocean of ‘sustainable’ concrete salesmen, property developers and petrochemical insulation companies, three things stood out at EcoBuild as beacons of post-peak sanity. The first of these was the strawbale lecture theatre build by Barbara Jones and Bee Rowan of Amazon Nails. It was a beautiful example of strawbale building, with sections of the walls lovingly plastered. It was great to be able to do a talk about natural building in a strawbale theatre. They had built it in just two days, with sections of it being plastered with lime showing the different coats.
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24 Feb 2006
EcoBuild is the biggest green building exhibition in the UK, and ran over 2 days, 22nd and 23rd February. I went up for the first day, to give a talk called ‘Designing for Transition’. The event was in a huge hall and was very well attended. There were hundreds of stalls, everything from Government Agencies to community development groups and from architects to solar energy companies. It was great to see that the mainstream is starting to take the concept of more sustainable building seriously, and that so many people from within the industry attended. It was heartening to observe the diversity of people who attended, and the degree to which people were aware of the need for changing current practices. There were some wonderful things, some of which I’ll touch on over the next few days, but in this post I want to touch on one of the things that struck me most, the prolific abuse, in my eyes, of the word sustainable.
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In my work teaching natural building I often found myself using cookery metaphors. Clay plasters need to be mixed to a consistency of cookie dough, clay slip needs to be like a runny yoghurt rather than milk, a good final cob should be like a loaf of bread… people relate to this much more than technical lists of mixes. It gives natural building a familiarity and a resonance that clicks with people, in the same way that Jamie Oliver on telly knocking a 2 minute chocolate mousse together does. The modern cook book is a very different thing from a Mrs Beaton first edition. Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson; the books produced by these celebrity chefs are awash with gorgeous pictures of delicious meals, groovy chefs at work, they make good food beautiful, everyday and relevant.
