This is the house that dreams built...
12/11/2003 10:57 a.m.

Writting a story about some hippie friends of mine, and I inadvertently run across THE building material that will make all the crazy ass curved walls I've ever dreamed of not only possible, but simple!  I'm talking cob, baby!  Cob=Clay + Sand + Straw (roughly 25%, 75% and A LOT)  Cob, from the old English meaning "lump or rounded mass".  Building with cob has been equated to sculpting heavy clay.  And the best thing is that the red clay content in Indiana soil is prefectly suited to cob and the creek rock and limestone needed for the foundation is wonderously also an indigenous material.  (for Justin--I am Choctaw, I am one with the Land.)  For years I've been saying that it's a dream of mine to build a house in southern Indiana and quarry the stone to build it with off of the land.  But stone houses aren't always that pretty to me, and I just wanted to do so much with arches and domes, that limstone wouldn't really be the most cost-effective building material.  A single stone arched door frame of cut stone can cost 12,000.  And I don't know about you all, but I couldn't walk through my froint door every day knowing that the door frame alone costs more than I made last year!

And then there was cob!  I had rejected straw bale because it's too rectilinear, and adobe (though I love it) doesn't do well in wetter climates liked the Ohio River Valley...so I was looking into rammed earth pise.  But it requires building massive and (to my horror) mathematically precise forms, and costs roughly the same as traditional frame and sheet rock construction...Oh, but I found cob along the way, and now even the bas reliefs of naked bodies protruding from the walls in the bedroom are a possibility.  (Think, "Devil's Advocate"--Dustin Hoffman's office, but more innocent, ala Grecian Urn.)

And now I am actively looking for a piece of land, because I've decided that I'm going to build a house.  Being the architecture nut that I am, I have been designing a house for a long time now...and now that I know that it will be pretty cost-effective (mud is free, after all) to get the aesthetic features I want without haveing to rape the land or earn a fortune...well, it's on now.  I should be studying for a final I have to take in three hours,  but I'm not.  I'm drawing up plans for a window bench warmed from underneath by the flu from the bread oven.  And the round library that I'd given up on and decibed to make octaganol??  It's round again, and now I've added a revolving book case that leads into a bathroom (because I never realize that I have to pea really badly while I'm reading, and I end up doing this little "I have to pea" dance down the stairs)

This is a pic that I'm mighty proud of that I took of my hippie friends sitting in what will become their living room after the roof gets put on and a layer of Lime-kiln plaster put over the cob to seal it.  Note the beautiful inset benches ans sculptural details.  There is some beautiful work on the opposite wall where they've incorporated drift wood to frame a little ogee shelf.

(my apologies for any typos, it's finals week and I haven't slept in 30-something hours.)