Valley Futures

Read and view this book at Amazon.com.

Like many other professional disciplines, architects and building designers have their own sometimes-indecipherable jargon. I still remember my student architect colleagues during college casually throwing around terms that went right over my head. How wonderful, then, that our Valley’s own Bob Ferris, executive director of Yestermorrow Design and Build School, has just published a new book entitled Natural Building: Creating Communities Through Cooperation, printed by Schiffer Publishing and available locally, as well as through online book stores.

Here’s the back story. During summer 2007, eight Yestermorrow students and ten instructors gathered in Warren to build a single structure over the course of eleven weeks. They settled on designing a garden shed called the Folly, comprised of hand-hewn timbers, earth, straw and other natural materials – you can witness the structure just a few feet from the covered bridge in the center of Warren village.

Ferris and his colleagues decided to provide a written account of the process, as well. “Our book is one part how-to primer on natural building, one part commentary on group dynamics, and one part soul-enriching eye candy,” explains co-editor Ferris. “Natural building is an oeuvre that needs to be examined thoughtfully in these challenging times. While maybe not the whole answer, its message of using local materials and living more simply is certainly part of the answer.”

Their book boasts a number of wonderful features. The photographs – rich, colorful, and, in many instances, sized as a full page - convey a vivid sense of the process of making the Folly. The book, in this sense, functions almost as a coffee table text, though the images are very much about technique, as well – close ups of chisel and mallet cuts, for example, balance out wide-angle establishing shots of the group at work. And the collection of images covers the whole process from start to finish, from “laying a good foundation – the boots of a building,” through the niftily titled “mental and philosophical punchlist.” Even the photo captions are intriguing, from simple one word tags like “stone,” to detailed descriptions of the construction process. Mini-bibliographies entitled “On The Bookshelf” list texts for further exploration, so interested builders can do more research into various aspects of the work. Rounding out the book are mini-biographies of each student, and a reflective afterward by Ferris, in which he summarizes the problems and rewards of the process, and the inherent challenges that come with building as a team. As Page Houser eloquently states: “You start a-stompin’ cob, you soon realize it’s the cob a-stomping you.”

Ultimately, the text is an inspirational tribute to natural building techniques, which Yestermorrow explains as “a philosophy and practice emphasizes socially,culturally, and environmentally responsible building. This is typically realized in the use of basic, elemental materials (e.g., earth, wood, stone and straw) that require little or no processing and are found on-site or locally sourced. The methods of natural building are often labor intensive but not capital intensive. Because natural building espouses an approach that preferentially uses materials that are processed less and travel fewer miles, they tend to contribute less greenhouse gases than their conventionally-built counterparts. In addition, naturally-built structures tend to be smaller, better sited to take advantage of the interplay between solar radiation and thermal mass, and occupied by folks who have the inclination to examine and minimize their carbon footprints.”

Veterans of natural building who might dismiss this book as little more than a primer would do well to remember that every structure has a story, and, as the age of cookie-cutter corporate industrial housing wanes, all of us will find much to learn in this engaging, visually attractive and hopeful book. May the community-building continue.

Tags: Arts and Media //