Cob: experience is overrated -- an eight-year-old with a cookbook could do this stuff!

[otherfish]

To Donna & all,

Recently Donna wrote:
<< 
 ..........there isn't much more to be said for experience in Natural
Building!!  The workshop consisted of classes and practica.  The classes
were instructive but the practica were monotinous and hardly at all
instructive...................experience is overrated and all they really
need to do is take their class notes home and build their own barns!
>>

I feel compelled to comment:
While in concept, a negation of the value of experience could be accurate,
there is in fact something to be said for the act of learning.  Cob is
relatively simple and it does not take long to learn the BASICS.  Hovever
there is more to a cob building than just mixing and stacking the mud.  The
many variables to be taken into account can only be learned by doing so in
many different situations.   As in so many things, the more you build with
cob the better at it you will become.  A correlary is also true: a little
knowledge mixed with overconfidence is potentially dangerous.

I've been designing and building in one form or another for over 50 years,
and in many ways, I'm just truly beginnig to understand the implications of
what I do.  In my youthful arrogance, I thought I was the hottest thing
going.  Then in time came the daunting realization that making even the
first decision of a project defines and limits the final outcome.  The act
of putting pencil to paper or pick to the ground can go a zillion different
directions - but the truly limiting factor is what's between your ears.

Before I learned cob, a pile of dirt just looked like a pile of dirt.  Now I
see a building.  But to get there requires a lot of different processes to
happen in some fairly specific orders.  To make that pile into a building
that is truly what it COULD be is a blending discipline, knowledge, skill
and art.

There is a reason the apprentice / journeyman / master path came to be so
long ago.  And a reason it still exists if one is truthful about it.  There
is so much to learn and the nuances of it all are HUGE.  Impatince hinders.

I've worked cobbing next to people who were totally cluless and their work
had to be removed lest it compromise the wall.......while others got it
right away, but even then, those quick folks still had lots to learn.  The
traditional ways of building with non industrial products - that is to say,
Natural Building, have been lost to us.  Pre industrial builders stood on
the work of those who came before.  Their understanding of their materials
and methods were learned from having been done over and over and over, till
only those ways that truly worked survived to be used.  This in many ways is
where we find ourselves as the lovers and fools of our devotion.  To be a
natural builder in this time means to be a learner, inventor and teacher and
all at the same time.  Yet at the same time, there are so many principals of
building that hold true from the hard won past that to learn them is
essential.

john fordice