Natural Building Intensive: 5 Days of Dirt

Last week, we participated in a 5 day intensive workshop on Natural Building.  The course was held in the East Bay, so it was a bit of a trek - half of us camped on site (no water or electricity) and the rest stayed with family in the area (no brainier).

The course was taught by Massey Burke, Natural Builder Extraordinaire.  She has been building for 8 years, co-founded her own company Vertical Clay, and also interned at SLI.  She is the brain and the brawn behind the mosaic cob showers in the intern village, as well as the Pach.  An incredibly talented and creative woman, it was a week long workshop that felt anything but "intensive".  It may actually have been my favorite SLI course thus far. And it has nothing to do with getting to play with mud all day.

Before diving into the nitty gritty and bombarding you with photos (I have loads), I should start by explaining what natural building is.  I certainly didn't know when I first arrived at SLI.

Natural building, as defined by Massey, is the art of building using local and unrefined materials.  Think: from your backyard, and you do all the prep work.  But in a very good way.  It's incredibly energy efficient - from how you source and create the building materials, but also in the end result.  Natural building utilizes design practices such as passive solar, where you orient your home according to the sun's path maximizing sun/heat in the winter and minimizing it in the summer.  Plus, earthen materials also naturally moderate building temperature - so, depending on what materials you use, you can effectively keep your home cool in 100 degree heat without AC, and keep it warm when it's cold out.  Brilliant, eh?

Our project for the week was to build a composting toilet on a large piece of property, a short distance from the main house.  When we arrived, the foundation had already been laid, so our job was to do the rest. Build up 4 walls, leaving room for a window.  

Day 1
After introductions, we jumped right in making adobe bricks.  Adobe is a mixture of clay soil, sand and straw.  If you're familiar with cob, it's essentially the same 'recipe' of earth, just used in brick form. (Cob is typically molded - throwing gobs of the mixture right onto the foundation building a structure in curvature).  Massey walked us down to the bottom of the property and showed us the soil we would be using.  I would have never known by just looking at it that it had so much clay in it. 

First, we poured the clay soil into the water (not the other way around) until it turned into a consistency best described as 'pudding.'

Next, we mush this all around, breaking up any solid clay bits and watch and wait as the mixture thickens.  Different clays take different amounts of time to absorb water.  Next, we added in some sand as well as straw.  Traditionally, this mixture is mixed using bare feet, but we opted for just hands.  (Don't want to step on a hidden piece of glass.)  That said, we did some mixing with shoes and a tarp:

David adds straw

More mixing. Manually.

Once combined, we put the mixture into adobe brick molds (built right then with scrap wood), packed them in, then gently shook them out.  Viola!  Insta-bricks.  We did this quite a bit, making close to 100 bricks.  We also created a mixture without sand (just straw and clay) which were much lighter.

Brandon, Cassie & David giving it a go

Here are Brandon, Cassie and David making bricks live:



That's pretty much how we spent the first day.  Brick making + a lecture after lunch in the organic garden.

Days 2-5 up next.