Brian “Ziggy” Liloia is a 26-year-old member of the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage — which is probably all you need to know to draw some strong conclusions about him.
Anyway, he talks about building a house out of cob:
Thankfully, there are no building codes or zoning laws in this very rural part of Missouri, so I did not have to finagle with local bureaucracy in order to build my home. Not all are as fortunate, I realize.
There is something very primal about building with cob. You take your shoes off, pile up a bunch of sand and wet clay, and stomp it together with your bare feet to make a sticky, pliable, sculptural building material. It takes no heavy machinery, and the ingredients are completely natural, local. It’s been practiced all over the world (in slightly different forms) for thousands of years.
I love the sculptural qualities of cob: you are not confined to squares, and you can embellish along the way as your wall goes up. For me, the process of building a wall and seeing the progress is intensely satisfying, and addictive. In addition to all of this, cob is extremely accessible: anyone can learn how to do it in a day. I chose cob for all of these reasons, plus it’s incredibly cheap. I have spent less than $4000 on building materials for my house and improvements. I spent another $1000 on labor.The walls for my 200 square foot home cost less than $500 in materials. The clay came straight from our land. Straw came from the fields of local farmers.
Really, though, cob building is just a lot of fun, especially with the help of other people.
Sounds wonderful, right?
Well, the biggest lesson of this past winter has been that cob really isn’t that appropriate for this cold Missouri climate. Cob is not an insulative material, and despite the tiny size of my home (which I thought would be more to my advantage than has actually been the case), it is not the most efficient home to heat, because the walls become very cold when they are constantly exposed to winter temperatures. Not only that, there are condensation problems when warm air comes into contact with a cold cob wall. Ideally, I would have only built cob in conjunction with insulation. In fact, my partner April and I have decided to build a second house, converting the current cob house into a three seasons dwelling, so that we can try to build a more efficient, winter-appropriate house, with highly insulative walls, that will not have the same moisture problems. I still love my house, though, despite some of these problems that have popped up.
The Guardian visits some other dirty hippies in their “sustainable” homes — which happen to be on public lands: