This year at the Village Building Convergence, Portland's premier natural building and place-making event, I have teamed up with Mark Lombard to create a couple of cob benches for the future Boise-Elliot Marketplace at Fremont and Williams, in NE Portland.

Preparing the round poles for the roof structure

urbanite foundation for the benches

mark lombard :)

teaching cob

adorable round pole roof structures going up simultaneously

more cob!
dozens of people, from all walks of life get involved!

earth plaster base coat over the fresh benches, amazing how much we could accomplish in just one week

new friend kate!

living roofs planted as well!

Join us next year!
visit www.cityrepair.org for more info

Welcome to Clary Rose Farm!
A wonderful new permaculture demonstraiton site near Fort Jones, California

As per usual, I'm here to get dirty and show a bunch of people how to make a functional oven out of mud and some salvaged materials

Laying the insulative layer, old bottles make great air pockets in a bed a slip-coated sawdust.

Starting the cob

Laying the hearth floor with fire bricks

the sand dome form

the arched doorway

we also build benches into either side of the oven and integrate existing fence posts into the structure

straw-clay for insulation

sculptural cob holds it in

almost to the top!

Carrie is going to do decorative earth plaster once the oven is dry.
We enjoy pizza the first night!

This project is one of the most refined natural buildings I have had the opportunity to work on.
It's a 10'x10' wood-fired sauna with chip-slip insulated walls and site soil earthen plasters.

The small building is framed with a quartered cedar log for the corner posts and stick-frame Larsen trusses in between.

Then we create the integral forms for the chip-slip with large reed matting.

We unroll the mats and secure them with staples as the walls get filled. These reeds mats will also work great as the plaster substrate.

The infill mix is half a bucket of site soil slip per two buckets of bark-free wood chips. I like to mix them on tarps and carry the tarps directly over to the wall cavities.

We wait several months for the wall to dry and then it's time to plaster! I add metal lathe and substrate details where ever its needed. The mix is screened site soil, mason's sand and chopped straw.

I also did several stained glass windows, including little sliders for ventilation.

and a six foot wide arched-top dormer window!

The finish coat of plaster is the same as the base coat except that the soil and straw has been screened to a finer level. We also add five coats of linseed oil. This darkens the color and protects the plaster from the elements.

oiling details

rear view of finished building

side view of sauna, with stone faced shower area

viola!

Welcome to the community of Breitenbush Hotsprings!

I'm here leading the construction of an earthen oven with attached benches.
We decided to shape the oven as a raven, which has a lot of meaning for many of the members of this community.

Patrick has built a beautiful roof structure and stone foundation for the project.

The first workshop is focused on building the oven.

It's classic cob--all ages get involved!

At the next workshop, we build the wings and benches. The wings have an internal structure formed with wire fencing. Here Sara, the lead organizer of this project, is harvesting sand from the creek... This will work great for our plasters too.

The next workshop will be focused on painting the raven with an aliz, or clay paint. We are planning to do a design with Pacific Northwest Native American motifs. I'll post the workshop when the date gets set.

Until then, enjoy the pizza!

Welcome everyone, to Boom!
It's an art-based psytrance music festival located in the desert of eastern Portugal. It happens every other year and they are really making an effort to have all of the structures as natural and earth-conscious as we can make it.

I'm here to play with bamboo as much as possible and build a strawbale wall around a movie screen/workshop area that needed some added sound isolation. I didn't know exactly what I was getting in to when I arrived, but it turned out great, and there's a lot of photos here to give you a glimpse at my adventure. I brought along dear friends, Sebastian, Julia and Fezzo to help make it happen. Dozens of other bamboo builders and volunteers from around the world learn to get in the mud and see what we can do with all this clay, sand and straw.

we start with an outline of the wall created by some locally grown bamboo poles

I decide to use the bamboo framework as external pinning and stack the bales into columns between them

extensive staking with hand carved bamboo splits help toe nail each bale to the next. Thanks to Danny Pando for making all those beautiful stakes and doing it fast enough to keep up with the flow.

I make a really fancy tying system to hold the external framework together but only reveal a beautiful simple lash once plastered.

My fearless friends, Sebastian and Ilima, help me get the bales up to 14 courses high! Lots of hammering and balancing involved on this one. We also spend a few days shaving the corners of the bales and shaping the form as much as possible.

Then comes the mud

The first coat over the bales is a basic clay slip

Our head honcho and bamboo guru, Gerard, gets into it!

working all together we cover 300 bales in about 2 days!

Then, we start a finish plaster mix in two huge pits lined with old billboard material

and yes, the most fun and efficient way to mix, is to just dive right in!

besides, getting coated in mud helps protect us from the scorching sun!

diving the edges up to the bamboo provides a nice place for a cold joint and gives each volunteer a sense of accomplishment, one section at a time.

plus the juxtaposition of mud and bamboo is so beautiful!

already a great place for our snack and juice break, i will never forget those white cheese sandwiches!

we keep plastering

even through the night

Julia works on a sculptural bench

it turns out just lovely

check out the site-found crystal that we integrate into it!

on the back side of the wall, we build shelves for the 'marketplace'

i create a nest to hide the joint between the edging branches

meanwhile, I help make this special component that will support the fanning shade sails

and a shade structure starts to go up around the theater area

we spend an entire night spreading out ten dump truck loads of sand throughout the arena

in use!

After the festival, we take down the sails, but get to leave the wall standing. It's going to be used as a drive in movie theather for the local community.

long distance aerial shot from my campsite

hard work pays off!

photo credits: Julia Bonneheim & Erica Ann