ZG: Can you tell me about your path into natural building?
CP: Yeah, cob is how I got into natural building. I still find it shocking that people aren’t familiar with cob, not because I live in this cob-centric world, but just from reading books…remember those children’s books, Frog and Toad? They live in a cob cottage. So when I heard about cob it wasn’t a new thing. I was like, oh yeah it’s a house in England and it’s made out of mud. How it originally started is I was in college at Humboldt State (now Humboldt Cal Poly) and I went to a used bookstore and I could not [find whatever] I was looking for…and as fate would have it, was The Straw Bale House by Athena and Bill Steen. And I just thought, ‘How are you going to build a house out of straw?’ So I picked it up, bought it, and pretty much made it my homework. I was reading through it, highlighting it, talking to my brother and my roommates, my friends about it, like ‘This is insane.’ Three main events brought me into natural building. That was one. Around the same time, I was walking past this homestead that was on my campus, and I found out they were lime-plastering this terrace for this garden bed. I was like ‘What are y’all doing?’ And they said, ‘Grab a trowel.’ So I started plastering just randomly on my way home. And I met a friend. And then, I wanna say that weekend, I was doing acro yoga at the park and my friend was like, ‘Hey, this guy’s building adobes’ and I was like, ‘Okay, I need to know about that’. This old dude was going to teach this stranger how to build adobe bricks in exchange for something, and I was like, ‘Can I come and learn from you as well?’ So the very next day we went over and made some clay bricks. I had never seen a blue clay like that. It was a bluish-gray. I was like, ‘Hey, where’d you get this?’ He told me the exit, off the side of the freeway, and I went to the friend that I met [while] lime plastering, like, ‘Hey, I found out where we can get clay. Do you want to build something?’ So in a matter of weeks, I learned about natural building, started making bricks, and then got a friend who already had some knowledge about clay.
ZG: Wow. How do you keep that energy up after such a quick introduction to things?
CP: Funny enough, I was watching primitive technology videos [on YouTube], by John Plant. He’s the one that started the huge, underground waterfall pool videos done by the Thai people you know?
ZG: Haha yes.
CP: Yeah he started that whole movement. I remember being on my college campus watching this video that he made, showing my friends, and I was like, “I have to go learn to do this.” I remember closing that window and then booking a trip to Guatemala. It’s a common thing to go to Guatemala and do your yoga teacher certification training, and then do natural building. So I went to Guatemala, I started building and it turned out I did not read the fine print, I just booked the trip. We were building bamboo structures for a music festival and I didn’t know. I got there and I was like, “Oh, there’s a music festival.” I shouldn’t have done that (laughs). But in our time off, a buddy I had met there had a business partner who was also in Guatemala at the time staying with his Indigenous family. We get there and it turns out he had built their own house himself. He had started renting out rooms to tourists, but there was just beautiful work, and it was very practical, and we just spent the whole day questioning him about it. We just showed up at his door and started talking about his building. He was pretty, I don’t know, excited, some tourists or foreigners could speak his language and appreciate the work that he’d gone through. And so he lived on top of a hill and just built these awesome things and we had formed a bond. By the time the festival and everything was over, he said, ‘Hey, you want to stay with me? You can build here and stay here for free.’ So I just missed my flight and took microeconomics online. I would go and build with him in the mornings, and then in the afternoons, I would do my online course. I was there every day of winter break, and then I flew [back to the U.S.] and got back the day before school. It gave me a lot of experience and understanding with bamboo, clay, and cob. The next semester back at school there was a natural building course that I wanted to take. It was a class with Lonny Grafman. We got to learn about micro-hydroelectric power, solar power, rainwater catchment, and natural building. 29 Lonny Grafman is incredible. He takes students all around the world and he implements appropriate technology and natural building. He goes to a place and can’t promise investors what they’re going to build; he just knows that they’re going to attack a problem. So he goes wherever and they interview the community, and they’re prepared to build anything. They’re not gonna say ‘You need solar power’ you know, they ask ‘What takes up most of your day? What’s the most inconvenient thing?’ He is a huge inspiration on how I approach building, and how I approach problems in everyday life. He’s the most humble man, but his work ethic and drive are unparalleled. It’s inspiring and he’s how I have been able to approach natural building and design. So In this [natural building] course, everyone gets assigned a project, a practical project that then we are responsible for drawing up plans and then actually implementing them. And we ended up building a rocket stove on campus. So the first time I’d ever been to a cob workshop I was teaching it with my friend. But we had done enough research, and cob’s not super complicated you know, but just looking back –it’s so funny to process– we basically would get up in the morning, go to school, stomp on some mud, and stack it. And then throughout the day, whether it’s the weekends or before between classes, we were just stomping mud and building this rocket heater. Then for like two days, we were leading a cob workshop for maybe 15 other college students. When you get intoin a natural building, you’re always teaching, and so that was something that I had experienced right from the get-go. That time was during the pandemic, you know, all we had was YouTube. And so I feel like there were probably six months where I [saw] every single YouTube video on cob. The Nito Project, which is Benito Steen’s channel, son of Athena and Bill, has some great content, and he’s a large part of why I’m so fascinated with plastering and natural building. A couple of months after college, I hadn’t touched mud in a couple of years, and I didn’t like what I was doing., I knew I had to get out and do something with a future that I was excited about. All the books that I’ve read and a lot of the YouTube channels, at least at that time, had some sort of tie to 30 the Cob Cottage Company, which is up in Oregon. I ended up getting [an apprenticeship]. One of their main teachers for like 20 years, is Betty Seaman, the builder/founder of a cob community called Spirit Pine in Southern California. [She led] the apprenticeship there, and that’s really where I got my time in the mud. It was three months off-grid in the mountains, just day in and day out: waking up at six, ending at six, just mud and it was hot. Betty’s an incredible builder. She’s an incredible lady. To this day, she’s one of my best friends. I learned a lot from her. My friend and I got our first natural building job a couple of months after the apprenticeship ended; putting a roof on a cob house. That’s how I got started or at least that’s how I got my education in natural building.
ZG: Once you had learned these skills, how did you decide to move forward with a professional career in natural building?
CP: I just didn’t like anything else I was doing, and clay just sounded super fun. I thought it would be wild if I could somehow do this for money. And other people were doing it! And so my mindset was that the first generation of natural building revivalists are ready to retire. Now, of course, we have adobe builders that have been in America and Mexico for a lot longer, but for this purpose, you know this renaissance of natural building is run on word of mouth and it’s very in-person. I figured if I could just meet these people, then I would have at least more opportunities to hang out in the mud. So I spent the first half of 2022 just looking for opportunities to get experience. I had a great foundation in cob, but I knew to do [natural building professionally] I needed more. I remember looking up every workshop I could find in California and just messaging them: ‘Hey, can I come to your workshop? This is what I’ve done, this is who I’ve met, this is who I’ve worked for, and this is what I’d like to do. I’ll mix. You don’t have to teach me anything. I just want to be in the mud.’ And I traveled just trying to meet everybody, because I’ve noticed too, that if you work with somebody for any given time, they’re willing to recommend you across the world to their friends. My mobility allowed me to get experience. It was just about getting experience and it was tough, you know, like I was sleeping in my tent, I was sleeping on the ground, I was sleeping on couches, but I just traveled as much as I could, met as many people as I could, so that many people could vouch for me.
ZG: What do you think are some of the pros and cons of learning how you did? How has all this travel, and putting in your time and resources affected you?
CP: Of course. I think one of the most difficult things was getting that experience. Let’s say you work an internship. The apprenticeship costs money, but if you work an internship, you’re not making any money typically. Most of the time it’s where you live. But in this case, this learning experience cost me money. [Right after college] I had started that gardening business and had a couple of clients. I’m super grateful that I could come back and get work anytime I wanted to [in between natural building projects]. I was essentially making money at this one job so I could lose money at another job. I was spending over $900 a month on gas, sometimes $1200-$1300 a month, because I would shoot to Washington on a whim, a 12-hour drive, just so I could get a spot on the wall to look at plaster. I was up and down the West Coast, like, just nonchalantly. You know, I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have a car payment. I was really motivated, I was excited, I was determined, but I realized that it’s a pretty limiting lifestyle to get into this. The most difficult part was that I had to create my curriculum. And that was just through finding people. Let’s say I didn’t have Betty, how are we starting this? You also have to be comfortable being alone. I have a lot of friends who live this life, and for me after two years of doing it, it can wear on you. For example, I was in Southern California, and then I traveled to Arizona for a workshop, came back to Southern California for a few weeks, then I went up to Central California, came back down for a few weeks, then from there back out to the middle of California, went up to Washington for a week, came back down to Central California, drove to all the way to Texas on like a week’s notice, and was there for two months, then drove from Texas back to Central California, and then just drove all the way to Oregon. That was 20,000 miles on my truck in five months.
ZG: That’s wild. So why did you decide to keep going despite all of these challenges?
CP: Everything else sucks. I don’t know, like everything else is not great in the world. And at least in this, you could kind of ignore all that. I think that’s why I kept going in the beginning: I had worked so many jobs, my first job I was 10 years old and working outside, and then I got a job at a pizza parlor, and then at an ice cream shop, and then I was a salesman, and then I worked for the Forest Service, and then I sold solar [PV panels] and was just like ‘I have a pretty wide array of job experience’ and I didn’t like any of that. [Natural building] didn’t really feel like a job. I could just hang out with my friends and do what I wanted to do. Plastering was so difficult for me to get in the beginning. But if someone said ‘Hey I need you to get really good at blinking’ or ‘I need you to get really good at walking’, it’s like infinite practice: every time you do it you’re getting better. That’s like with plastering: every time you’re putting mud on the wall, is like practice. In an eight-hour day, you get hundreds of attempts to perfect your spread. It was really addicting. I [also] enjoy restoration. The thing I like about plaster repairs, and restoration in general, is that you are seeing a thought process. If you take apart any building, you can see the thought process, but if you take apart a natural building you can see the thought process, and then you can relate to it, and you can see why they made the building: limited resources, the time factor, or whatever was available at the time. You can peer into what these builders were doing, and then relate to them, because time is the only thing that separates you from that person, and you’re able to lessen the gap between you two.
ZG: So It seems like there might be two camps: some natural builders expect younger natural builders to develop professionally through workshops that you pay to attend or to do just low or unpaid work, and then other natural builders want to provide paid on-the-job training experience that’s more like an apprenticeship. What have your experiences been with these two main pathways?
CP: I think first and foremost we shouldn’t be reliant on the workshop to professional trades pathway [for] a steady workforce. It’s just two different worlds: [being a] workshop [participant] and [being a] professional tradesperson. On-the-job training should be the standard. It’s the nature of construction where you’re going to have unskilled N O 7 6 31 people that you’re in charge of teaching. I hope that we can together as an industry step up and continue to provide opportunities to the next generation. I’ve experienced both [workshops and paid trades work]. Now, every volunteer opportunity I’ve stepped into, I knew was a volunteer opportunity, but I have been offered positions where I didn’t feel [the lack of compensation] was right. I see that when people don’t have a mentor or guide like I have had in Betty, it can feel pretty sticky. I have been to projects where somebody is camping out for weeks on end for free, just trying to learn. It’s prevalent in natural building. I’m hoping that compensating people for their time becomes the standard, regardless of skill, and that we take it upon ourselves to then make them skilled. No one was born with these skills, you know, it’s in our DNA –it’s in our blood– to be able to do this but, you had to learn it from somebody. Just because your learning experience wasn’t pleasant or wasn’t compensated, doesn’t mean that that has to be the norm. I had to pay several thousand dollars for my apprenticeship. I’m comfortable with that dynamic; it got me the entry to so many things. We pay for an education, and I’m okay with that, but I would like to see a world where people are encouraged both socially and financially to dedicate [themselves to natural building]. It’s a tricky subject. I know that I have benefited from saving up a ton of money and being blessed to have worked for myself and having clients outside of natural building that allowed me to pursue this career.
ZG: What is next for you in your career?
CP: Woah big accountability moment right now (laughs)! The dream has always been to go to Scotland to learn restoration, and at the very least, just go to the U.K. and build. So if anyone in the U.K. needs a hand, let me know. [I want to] just learn from as many people as I can, that’s always been the goal. From what I can see, you need three things to become an experienced natural builder; preference of aesthetic, preference of process, and preference of building method. You can only get those through experience. You can’t get preference through reading a book or having a conversation. What kind of trowel do I like, what kind of hawk do I like? Do I want to scoop out of a bucket or do I want a mud board? What kind of scaffold do I like? For any experienced natural builders or anybody who has young people on their crew: just cherish them, and know what they have to go through to be a part of this world because this is not something you fall into. The people who are in this world really want to be in this world and it’s not easy.
