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Cob
Building Tutorial
Chapter
4: A Holistic Approach to Design
(Dare to be Different)
 Building with cob allows you a unique opportunity to change how you think about buildings in general. The square, box-like dwellings that most of us take for granted don’t lend themselves to organic design concepts. While it is possible to build a ‘crackerbox palace’ using cob, to me that’s kind of missing the point. Cob has a sculptural quality about it. You can quite literally mold your house into anything you want. Because of this plastic quality of cob, curved walls are much easier to build. Curved walls make more efficient use of space, and blend much better into a natural landscape, as
these pictures demonstrate.
When designing your home, first study the building site extensively. Is there a view that’d require a window somewhere? What about the levels of the land? Is it possible to build a tiered home on many levels so that it will blend more efficiently with the landscape? How will the final product look once incorporated into the land?
All of these questions might sound overwhelming at first, but as you progress you’ll see that the answers come almost instinctively. Due to this instinctual nature of cob building, it’s best when designing your home not to get too firm in how you wish the final product to look. This might be a problem if your building inspector requires you to provide detailed plans before issuing a building permit, but if you have the freedom to adjust plans as the work progresses, take advantage of this opportunity!
As you design your home, think more about how you’ll use it than how it’ll look. Most modern houses are built using a ‘systems’ approach that firmly delineates how each room will be used (‘this is a bathroom, this is a kitchen, this is a bedroom,’ etc.). If you think about your lifestyle for a moment, you’ll see that your life is probably not divided up evenly into separate compartments. I often eat in the living room if I have a project I’m working on. I sometimes read in the bedroom. I even sing in the kitchen on occasion! The point is that few rooms are used only for their original purpose. So as you lay out your floor plan, consider how you’ll actually be using your home.
The next step is to draw a circle representing each functional area of your home. This isn’t to say that each of these functional areas will be a separate room. Bear in mind that each of these circles can be used for more than one purpose. For example, in figure 4A, the kitchen circle could also be used for the dining area, so it may be possible to eliminate the dining circle altogether. Remember that you’re working towards maximum efficiency, so if a room can be used for more than one purpose, do so.
As you add circles to your rough sketch, think about the most efficient flow of traffic among the circles. It may help in this regard to simply cut several circles from a piece of paper, rearranging them until you find the most efficient pattern.
Once you’ve discovered the layout that works for you, begin thinking about how you’ll build the final product. As mentioned earlier, the most efficient shape to maximize space in a structure is the circle. It might help to start with a basic circular design, then to incorporate the rooms into this structure. You can also link circles together to form interesting shapes. If privacy isn’t an issue, you could even built just one big open room with different areas for different purposes. For example, you could have a kitchen area marked off by cabinets, but still part of the larger living space. As you work through this phase, always keep in mind what the final product will look like. Create a rough sketch floor plan based on this concept, keeping in mind that you are always free to modify the plan as the work progresses. This is just a ‘jumping off’ point for the final project.
Here’s an example of a first-draft floor plan I created from the functionality layout above:
When creating your design, consider the possibility that you may eventually want to add on to your home. If this is a concern, make sure that in your design you leave yourself a place to ‘attach’ the future additions. In the sketch above, the space between the staircase and the front door could eventually be used to connect an addition to the home. Think also about how this fits in with the land. You don’t want to leave a spot on your wall to attach an addition if the wall faces a portion of the site that wouldn’t be suitable for building!
Once you’ve gotten a good idea of what the floor plan will look like, work on the elevations. For those of you who aren’t savvy with architectural lingo, ‘elevations’ are simply side, back, and front views of the final building. Try to imagine what the finished building will look like, and try to fit it into the surrounding landscape comfortably.
 There are a few basic considerations when designing your home. Remember that one of the axioms of building with cob is that smaller is better. This is not to say that you can’t build a huge home with cob, but the point of building with natural materials is to be as conservative as possible. Not to mention the fact that due to the labor-intensive nature of cob building, designing huge rooms looks a lot better on paper than it does when you’re out on the site trying to build the actual structure.
One of the tricks to minimizing square footage is to make creative use of alcoves, nooks, crannies and shelving. Cob naturally lends itself to hand-sculpting such details. Installing a shelf is a simple matter of sticking a board in a wall at the right height, then cobbing around it. Alcoves can be inserted in a similar fashion. By making use of such spaces in creative ways, you take advantage of vertical storage space and therefore reduce the need for closet space.
Another advantage of cob building is that you can actually make the furniture a part of the house! Instead of trying to figure out where you’ll put couches, chairs and such in the finished room, you can actually make them a part of the room by sculpting the furniture itself out of cob! This increases the efficient use of space by making the furniture part of the building.
When the floor plan is finalized to your satisfaction, the next step is to fit it to the landscape. Go to the building site you’ve marked out, and ‘draw’ an outline of the floor plan on the actual building site itself. You may do this by using twine and stakes, or you may mark it out using some other method. Since the next step will be laying the stone foundation, I find that using lime in a water pitcher helps. Simply trace the outline of the floor plan to scale by pouring the lime out onto the ground. These ‘lime lines’ will help guide you as you dig the footer for the foundation. The problem with this method is that you have to make sure there isn’t going to be a storm that day. You’ll have to dig the foundation all in one day to make sure that wind or rain doesn’t erase your lines. If it will take you longer than one day to complete this task, you may want to mark the foundation lines with twine and stakes instead.
If you will be incorporating plumbing or electrical lines into your final design, now is the time to put those installations in. You can bury conduit and pipes in cob with no problems, so keep that in mind as you install these features.
Now that you’ve got your floor plan marked out on the ground, it’s time to move on to the foundation.
About the pictures in this
tutorial: Not all of the cob structures in the pictures shown here
were built by the Culture Artist Cobbers. Many are from cobbers at various
sites around the world. I have attempted to get permission for all the
photos used on this site, and to properly credit them wherever possible.
When the cobbers in question have a website, I have tried to link the
picture back to their site, or list them in the Cob
Builders' Directory, or both. I have made every effort to gain
permission for all the pictures shown. If I inadvertently used one without
permission, please contact me at chuck@cultureartist.org
and I will either credit the source or remove it. Thanks!
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