Cob: Ianto Evans Cob Cottage to Do Book Signing/ Slide Show early Nov Southern California Locations

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

Hello everyone
Last year we organized a Book Signing/Slide Show for Toby Hemenway
Permaculture Book "Gaia's Garden" From Berkeley to San Diego. Which was a
great success because of all the help we got in the communities he visited.

This year I am happy to announce Ianto Evans of Cob Cottage Company in
Oregon (www.deatech.com/cobcottage) has agreed to come to Southern
California in early Nov. 2002 to celebrate the release of the amazing new
book The Hand -Sculpted House A Practical and Philosophical Guide to
Building a Cob Cottage www.chelseagreen.com/Shelter/HandSculptedHouse.htm.
He will be able to do book/signings and/or also Slide Shows in each
community. this is first visit to Southern California

I am contacting many of you again and new folks to see if you are
interested in having him come to your community. We are planning a tour
that will start in Arcata and end up in San Diego. It will be a ten day
tour, we hope to have him come to Marin Berkeley, Santa Cruz,SLO, Santa
Barbara, Ojai, Ventura ,LA, Laguna Beach, San Diego to start with. I have
contacted a number of Folks in each community to see who is interested.

We can discuss all the details once I hear from you and whether we can
arrange a date for Book Signing and/or BookSigning/Slide Show. Once I hear
from all of you I will call Ianto Evans and get him to confirm a time
period he will be in Southern Ca in early Nov.
thanks wes roe

Cosponsored by Santa Barbara Permaculture Network and Hopedance Magazine
For more info: (805)- 964-1555 Wes Roe / e-mail: lakinroe at silcom.com


Introduction to The Hand -Sculpted House A Practical and Philosophical
Guide to Building a Cob Cottage, Excerpt from the book with Permission by
Ianto Evans for Promotion of the Book Tour
wes

BY IANTO EVANS
WHAT IS COB? COB IS A STRUCTURAL composite of earth, water, straw, clay, and
sand, handsculpted into buildings while still pliable. There are no forms
as in
rammed earth, no bricks as in adobe, no additives or chemicals, and no need
for machinery. Cob is not new and not untested. Its viability has been
thoroughly proved, all over the world, for centuries and probably millennia.
But despite great public enthusiasm for natural building, most how to
building books and architectural histories contain hardly a mention of
this common, almost universal, building technique. This book was written to
fill that gap.
What is Earth's most common building material? Why, earth itself of course!
Even today between a third and a half of us humans live in houses of unbaked
earth. Must all earth buildings be mud huts in Africa? Well, no, they're also
lavish adobe haciendas in Latin America, rammed earth mansions in France,
earthbrick palaces in China. They're tenstory apartments in Yemen, old
fortified monasteries in the Middle East, puddled and handshaped and
pressbricked and foot stomped earthen buildings from near the Arctic Circle
in Norway to the tip of Chile and the polar end of New Zealand. Millions of
them.
Adobe is well known to most of us. Rammed earth is increasingly in the news
again. Even pressbrick, poured adobe, and wattle and daub are terms we have
heard over the years. Yet the simplest, most accessible, and most democratic
earthbuilding technique was until very recently almost unknown.
Ten years ago there were no cob builders in the United States. Nobody had
built cob in North America for 150 years, or in the British Isles since the
1920s. There was no guidebook to cob construction, almost no descriptive
writing, and no public awareness of the possibility. The continuity of master
builders had, like a dead language, been lost. The revival of cob in the late
1980s depended on assumptions, deductions, and flimsy scraps of outdated
information. In a single decade this has changed. More than a thousand
students have passed through The Cob Cottage Company's trainings; many are
themselves already teaching. Michael Smith's book, The Cobber's Companion,
the first work exclusively devoted to cob building, has been a remarkable
success. Now the mainstream media are involved, and cob building looks as if
it may be here to stay.
I've been an architect involved in building since the early 1960s. In these
thirtyfive years I've seen dozens of "alternative" building fads flit by,
many of them touted as more ecological, less energyintensive, suitable for
owner-builders, more occupantfriendly, and so on. Many were utterly
frivolous attempts at publicity and profit, or obvious deadends. Some were
structural liabilities. Others were basically good ideas that got out of
hand. Most of them I've tried, one way or another; few left any permanent
inspiration. I'm cynical now about any new, heavily publicized "ecological"
building system. Why would cob be any different? I have regularly had to ask
myself whether at sixtyone I'm squandering what's process, and questioning
our every move. This process continues as we write, so your book is already
out of date; our opinions on many minor technical issues will probably have
changed even before you read this.
The HandSculpted House is not a recipe book. Because earth is such a
variable material, any attempt to provide standard recipes and proportions
for mixing cob and mud plasters often leads to frustration. Rather than
codifying the process, we prefer to give you a thorough understanding of what
makes cob buildings work, so you can make your own decisions based on our
practical experience and your own sound judgment. The best experimental
builder is a skeptic. Consider this book a widely experienced but potentially
fallible advisor. Always do your own tests, and trust your own experience and
intuition over the advice of the "experts," including us. Build something,
experiment, ask questions, then push the known limits of the materials,
systems, and techniques described herein. This book is intended as a
companion to, rather than a substitute for, workshops and other handson
learning. At times we've struggled to explain in words what can be much more
easily demonstrated in practice.
We hope this book will be a bridge to your greater involvement in the natural
building movement. Societal change can only be brought about by many people
acting together, so don't keep your ideas, enthusiasm, or discoveries to
yourself. Take a workshop, write an article, invite friends to help you
build, teach your neighbors, get on the radio, attend a Natural Building
Colloquium. Together we can make our voices heard. As the old English proverb
says, "If you throw enough mud, some of it will stick."
Congruent with developing an essentially new construction system and a
gentler approach to creating buildings, we have attempted to manage our
individual and collective lives in a manner consistent with our values. All
of this needed to be reflected in this book, otherwise none of us would feel
honorable. In committing to publication we must take responsibility for every
tree that was cut to make this paper, the fuel for transport, chemicals used
in printing, and the seemingly inevitable toll of tiny lives that are
extinguished by commerce and industry. We hope this book is valuable enough
to more than offset these costs. The dividends in changes of attitude,
creation of more opportunities for ecological buildings, and diminution of
environmental damage all need to be great, or we have merely contributed to
the problem. So, borrow a copy if you can (ask your local public library to
order it) or if you can't, buy a copy for your library to lend out, knowing
that this way you can read the book whenever you want.
Most importantly, building is not something you should try to do quickly to
get a finished structure. Both building and living in your house are
spiritual processes of daily joy, reflection, and connection with Nature.
Taken slowly, the experience of building for yourself will be a high point of
your life, immersed in meaning and saturated with joy. Building your own
natural house may be the threshold to re-inhabiting your own part of this
small planet in a way that gives you great satisfaction and rests comfortably
with your conscience. We hope this book will help you summon the courage to
take charge of your own life, to build your harmless house and live in it in
harmony with the cosmos.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
The HandSculpted House is a result of eight years of close partnership in
The Cob Cottage Company and the accumulated experiences of three lifetimes.

Ianto Evans is an applied ecologist, landscape architect, inventor, writer,
and teacher with building experience on six continents. Cob is traditional in
Wales, his homeland. He teaches ecological building and has consulted to
indigenous nations, USAID, the World Bank, the U.S. Peace Corps, and several
national governments.

Michael G. Smith has formal training in environmental engineering and
ecology. He is the author of The Cobber's Companion: How to Build Your Own
Earthen Home and coeditor of The Art of Natural
Building: Design, Construction, Resources. He teaches, writes, and consults
on cob, natural building, and Permaculture.
Linda Smiley is a director of The Cob Cottage Company, as well as a master
cobber and recreational therapist. She also teaches workshops in cob,
sculpting sacred spaces, intuitive design, and natural plasters and finishes.

Part 1 was mostly written by Ianto, part 2 mostly by Michael, and the Onword
mostly by Linda. You will hear each of our voices in these three sections,
but we all had a hand in all of it: drafting, editing, circulating,
rewriting. In cases where a section or chapter is very much in one author's
voice, offering that person's particular viewpoints on an issue, we have used
a byline to indicate which of us is addressing you.