Building with Cob Quotes

“Earth as a building material began to be considered as inferior, and the product of poverty. It fell out of fashion due to social reorganisation – not because it was less durable than the new modern materials.”
― Adam Weismann, Building with Cob: A Step-by-step Guide

“The simple labourer’s cottage could be said to be Britain’s indigenous, vernacular building. It was always built with materials specific to the region, but was predominantly made out of stone and mud from the fields to make up the foundations and walls. Local trees were used for the roof timbers, and the grasses and reeds from the surrounding area for the thatch roof. It was generally built by its owner with the help of the pooled labour resources of the community, which comprised the poor, rural workforce that served the local estate, owned by the landed gentry. These made up the homes of the ordinary people in pre-industrial Britain.”
― Adam Weismann, Building with Cob: A Step-by-step Guide

“A unifying characteristic of these pre-industrial societies is their sense of holism, and their understanding that everything is linked, that all actions have an impact on all parts of the system, and the whole is more important of the sum of its parts.

To these traditional societies, progress is not seen, as it is in our societies, as a linear concept, moving along a straight line from the past into the present and into the future. In industrial societies, at each stage newer and more sophisticated things are invented, so that we feel that we are better off today than we were yesterday. in traditional societies, time is seen as a circle, ever linked to the eternal spin of the earth around the sun, and the cycle of life and death.”
― Adam Weismann, Building with Cob: A Step-by-step Guide