 Mark Jones of Cismont, with the help of friends and neighbors, is in the process of building an outdoor oven from cob. The material is also used to build houses and other buildings. |
Never heard of cob building? No surprise: It’s a lot more common on the wacky Left Coast than in these parts. In brief, cob is a natural building technique based on a mixture of sand, clay and straw, mixed with your bare feet and applied by hand. It looks a lot like adobe, though its origins are in the British Isles, and has a cool sculptural quality—think Play-Doh for enterprising grownups. Resources around here are scarce, though Dr. Ned Butchart (326-0782) is a local teacher of natural construction. And you can find cob workshops as close as Asheville, North Carolina, at www.naturalbuildingnetwork.org.
