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GDL08: Building with cob

Cob is a very eco-friendly and cheap building material, as I found out on Wednesday when I spoke to cob building expert, Kate Edwards. As with straw bales, I was surprised to find out that cob buildings are very long lasting and can be more than one storey tall – indeed, there is an example of a ten storey building that is over a thousands years old!

One of the nice things about cob is that for most people, they can source the material locally, from their own foundations. I chatted to Kate about that, and about the process of building cob buildings:

And then Kate gave me a demonstration, showing me how to insert windows into a cob building, and discussing the merits of the cob pizza oven:

I took a lot of photos, which I’ll post up here later, but in the meantime, here’s my Grand Designs Live photo set.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Grand Designs, exhibitions and events, materials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “GDL08: Building with cob”

  1. adrian2514 says:
    May 9, 2008 at 11:34 pm

    Hey! Thanks for the great info about Cob buildings. I had never heard of that type of building material, but I always support a cheap eco friendly subsitute!

    I was browsing through a bunch of green websites and blogs and I came across yours and found it very interesting. There are a bunch of others I like too, like the daily green, ecorazzi and earthlab.com. I especially like EarthLab.com’s carbon calculator (http://www.earthlab.com/signupprofile/). I find it really easy to use (it doesn’t make me feel guilty after I take it).

    Are there any others you would recommend? Can you drop me a link to your favorites (let me know if they are the same as mine).