Transition Culture

7 Jun 2007

Cob Building – an Opportunity to Get Mud Between Your Toes.

My friends Paul and Ivana are building a house round the corner from where I live, but not just any old house. They are building what I think is the town’s first new cob house for many many years. It is going to be a very striking and beautiful building, and it is already gathering a lot of interest from neighbours and passers by, with its undulating foundations and beautiful stonework. They have been planning this house for quite a while, and part of the process involved going out to The Hollies to see the cob buildings there. They are just nearing the end of building the foundations, which look gorgeous, undulating up and down around the building. They are also up for people lending a hand with the cob building…

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17 May 2007

“Wattle and Daub” by Paula Sunshine. A Book Review.

**’Wattle and Daub’ by Paula Sunshine. Shire Books. 2006. pp40.**

There is something very nourishing about the process of rediscovering the building materials of our ancestors. I often remark when teaching people about cob building that in the UK we have an earth building gene, that deep inside ourselves, once we start to handle these materials we find instinctively that we know what we are doing, they feel right in our hands, we feel at home with them. The first time I made a wattle and daub panel, we just decided we wanted to do one, and we used a book and made it up as we went along. We didn’t have great clay, we put the wattles too close together and didn’t use enough straw in the mix. It worked, but only just.

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11 May 2007

Urban Heat and Rural Heat – by Simon Fairlie

I don’t read Building for a Future magazine anywhere near as often as I ought to, but recently I picked up a copy and read an excellent article by Simon Fairlie, drawing a new angle on the zero-energy buildings debate. I have been a huge admirer of Simon’s work for years, in particular his work on rural planning through the campaign group Chapter 7, and always enjoy reading his work. This article has a particularly important take, I think, on the dangers of blindly putting cutting carbon emissions above the creation of resilience and the rebuilding of a rural economy.

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17 Apr 2007

The Wisdom of Old Buildings and the “Golden Stain of Time”.

Over the Easter break I went to Bradford-on-Avon near Bath, a beautiful place, blessed with a fine canal and some beautiful old buildings. I am always drawn to old buildings. There is something about them that is hard to define, what Christopher Alexander called The Timeless Way of Building. Hydrocarbon man has often vilified the buildings of our ancestors as basic and backward, but very often the common sense and practical ingenuity they contain is something we can only admire. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin summed up for me what is so powerful about old buildings when he wrote;

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29 Mar 2007

Learn Cob Building (and much more) in Beautiful West Cork.

The Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability in West Cork is running a very full set of courses, with a wider range of subjects than in previous years, and featuring, as is becoming a regular part of their calendar, the 9 Day Cob Building course with Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley. If you are interested in learning cob building, you couldn’t do better than to spend 9 days with Linda and Ianto, it is the course that has changed many lives! The Hollies is a beautiful place, and being there is an opportunity to see Thomas and Ulrike’s stunning cob house, the pizza house, the stoves, the gardens, the tree plantings, as well as learning in beautiful place. Although as one of its founder members I would say that, I really can’t recommend the learning experiences that The Hollies continues to offer highly enough, and it is wonderful to see that their education efforts are not only continuing but expanding. The full programme of events is as follows;

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