Cob, a handy tecnique for a new self-builder

Abstract

Five years of work and the house still not completely finished. It has been a very special worksite experience where our job was more to share everyday solutions due to the lack of experienced labor, the limited economy, and the sourcing of local and good quality raw materials. Compared to regular building technologies, using cob brings out totally new labor/material and time/money ratios. From the very beginning it was clear that, for once, monetary law wouldn’t guide the whole building process. Somehow it had some similarities with a cooperative project concerned with the distribution of benefits within the worksite rather than to the big goods suppliers. Although we had some experience in traditional rammed earth they chose cob because of its simplicity. Since this was the first self-build project we all had to find for ourselves the right way of working out each solution.