The Many Revivals of Natural Building

Ever since natural building was pushed out as the dominant construction paradigm (as explored by Ian Svilokos on page 4), it’s remained just beneath the surface of public awareness, making brief appearances whenever industrial construction’s limitations are especially obvious. Tracing an academic understanding of natural building from the romantic period to today, in this article Kenny Fallon Jr. argues that learning from these revivals is essential for natural building to meet the needs of our moment.

Legend has it that filmmaker and publisher Catherine Wanek coined the phrase “natural building” sometime when the movement coalesced in the early 1990s. This was back when low-tech building discoveries were mostly shared by word of mouth and magazine articles. Maybe it was suggested around a desert bonfire, maybe it was at a conference as Michael Smith remembers it, but whatever its origins, the exact definition and what methods truly count as “natural” have been hotly debated since. Natural building is generally considered to be a method of construction that uses less processed materials than conventional building materials of the day. Frequently touted comparative benefits that further define natural building include less embodied energy needed for production, less toxicity to work with or live with, and a more beneficial ecological impact before and after being installed.

Regardless of what you call it, there’s been a revival of “how we used to build” and the sources of this revival (at least in the U.S.) are 1) the revival of interest in vernacular building and ecological constraints, 2) the rise of the design/build and owner-builder paradigms, and 3) the growth of radical architecture publishing.

Returning to the Roots

Since Gottfried Semper’s exaltation of the “primitive hut” in the 1850s, it’s been trendy for architects to reference vernacular or rustic buildings. In different forms, many early modernist architects such as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius loved industrial and agricultural buildings and would sketch and photograph them. These buildings then partly influenced their work in this period. However, it wasn’t until Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s Native Genius In Anonymous Architecture (1957) was published in addition to Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects (1964) (with accompanying exhibition at the MoMA) that people started writing popular books about vernacular architecture as a criticism of the architectural profession. Without going so far as to say “get rid of architects”, they upheld the skill of regular people and older building techniques on the same level or higher than most 10 professional architects. This trend grew along with the counterculture in the 1960s, where conventional ideas about building and living were being publicly questioned and established

Teaching by Doing

Like natural building, design/build is a phrase that people in the U.S. use to describe a once-ubiquitous process that is relatively rare nowadays: people designing and building their own shelter. After the professionalization and industrialization of construction in the late 1800s made design/build projects less common, in part because the American Institute of Architects officially prohibited it in 1909. Twenty-four years later Black Mountain College re-introduced the idea. Exiles from the Bauhaus and other teachers committed to the centrality of the arts opened this experimental school in rural North Carolina. Even though it was short-lived, its impact was lasting; in 1965 a Black Mountain alum at the University of California- Berkeley opened community design centers across the San Francisco Bay area, partly in response to student demands.

At the same time in Prickly Mountain, Vermont architecture graduate students were completing experimental design/build projects. Prickly participants Steve Badanes, John Ringel, and Jim Adamson later founded the legendary design/build group Jersey Devil, and fellow Prickly person, John Connell, later founded the design/build and natural building school Yestermorrow in 1980. Charles Moore, the renowned architect and dean of the Yale School of Architecture, was inspired by Prickly Mountain to start the First-Year Building Project in 1966, the first U.S. college-level design/build program since Black Mountain. Yale was followed by a flurry of schools introducing design/build curricula. One year later in 1967, the University of California-Irvine opened the Farm, where students designed and built structures with techniques learned from visiting Indigenous artisans from the Pacific islands and Central America until it was shut down by university administrators. Another experimental design/build program managed to last longer by moving through different schools: Martin Pawley’s “Garbage Housing” studios, where students designed and built with reused materials, moved from universities in upstate New York to north Florida, and finally to southern California. In 1971 and 1972, the University of California- Berkeley’s “Making a Place in the Country” studio let architecture students design and build their shelters and a communal farm (with kitchen, sauna, chicken coop, and more) in rural northern California. Instructors Sim Van der Ryn and Jim Campe organized the studio and the resulting student documentation: the Outlaw Builders News.

Schools outside the U.S. often introduced design/ build curriculum as a blend of contemporary design education and older craft traditions. These schools include the 1956-late 70’s Baroda School of Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, India, where emphasizing “living traditions” was a way to deprogram colonial British education while avoiding simple nostalgia; the 1961-65 Mbari clubs of Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and what’s now Zimbabwe where the Bauhaus model was combined with pre-colonial building traditions in hands-on workshops; and The Centre for Alternative Technology, which opened in 1973 as Gerard Morgan-Grenville’s response to the shortages of the oil crisis of the same year. It remains in Wales to this day, where it has slightly broadened its approach to offering graduate-level education in sustainable building more generally. Other design/ build schools, such as the Musa Alami farm in Jericho, Palestine, had been built as self-sustaining communities for refugees. The educational farm and school made largely of adobe bricks, was built after the 1948 war and lasted until an Israeli invasion destroyed most of the farm and water sources in 1967.

It wasn’t until 1978 that the American Institute of Architects finally allowed licensed architects to practice design/build again. They relented after years of pressure, including what Forrest Wilson described in a 1970 editorial for Progressive Architecture:

“– an increasing number of architects, planners, designers, teachers, and artists, are searching for dimensions of their professions outside of what they feel are the narrow limits imposed by an increasingly restrictive society Counter culture, options, alternatives, change –call it what you will”.

The Growth of Little Magazines

The rise of the counterculture in the 1960s deepened a crisis in architectural education: students were frustrated with their schools’ slow integration, or even outright rejection, of newer ideas about social justice and ecology. In addition to pushing for hands-on socially-motivated design/build projects (which rarely lasted for very long if even started, as discussed above), students and frustrated graduates turned to little magazines as a new medium for N O 7 6 11 thinking through ideas. They published stuff that mainstream magazines wouldn’t, such as reckoning with the repercussions of modernism and rediscovering suppressed histories. The Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius offshoots of modernist architecture had by then revealed themselves as much more conducive to corporate campuses and neighborhood-flattening urban renewal than collective exuberance or bioclimatic inflection, like that of the work inspired by lesser-known figures like Hannes Meyer, Moisei Ginzburg, or MMM Roberto. National and domestic liberation movements of the time, along with a growing awareness of ecological collapse from books like Rachel Carson’s cautionary Silent Spring, drove young people to question the modernist canon and its role in society at large. Some student publications talked back to their schools. Some of these magazines focused on the social and political role of architecture, like the student reviews of guest lectures and comments on faculty politics in A: fritt forum for alle som er interessert i arkitektur of Norway, and others focused on architecture students’ overall dissatisfaction like Melp! and Le Carré Bleu in France, which helped to dissolve and reform the storied École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. Other publications printed critical design projects and risked arrest under repressive regimes such as Summa in Argentina and Arquitectura-Urbanismo- Construccion y Arte or AUCA (which means “rebel” and “indomitable” in the Indigenous language Mapudungun) in Chile. Others mixed their architecture writing with anarchist thought and freeform distribution methods like when Provo dropped some of their especially anti-royal material onto the queen’s barge from above. Others uplifted lesser-known histories and repressed directions of thought: Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau directly opposed Austria’s national architecture magazine and highlighted the work of then-mostly- forgotten architects like Adolf Loos, Rudolf Schindler, and Josef Hoffman; and Ou… in Brazil rejected their own rival nationalistic architecture student publication and instead advocated for affordable housing and architecture that addressed social issues. Other magazines emphasized the link between ecology, workers, and the built environment, like Polygon in the U.K. and Global Tools in Italy. ON SITE in the U.S. directly addressed the 1973 oil crisis and designers’ responsibilities for natural resource use. 12 On the more conservative end of this explosion in small-scale publishing was the back-to-the-land movement’s consumer-oriented publication: the Whole Earth Catalog (1968). The Whole Earth Catalog was largely an actual catalog of things for sale, most of which you’d want for your self- sufficient homestead in the woods. Some of those living out the fantasy implied by the Catalog were architects doing funky things, but even more were regular people trying to learn how to design and build things. There was a widespread sense of “opening up” the ancient skills of building shelter and embodying new forms of life. The editor of the Catalog’s shelter section, Lloyd Kahn, (himself an untrained builder and former insurance salesman) was inspired to publish a full book on vernacular and experimental building traditions called Shelter (1973) with Bob Easton, which has gone on to inspire countless designers and builders to this day, including natural building elders like Matts Myhrman, David Bainbridge, and David Eisenberg. Roger Welsch’s article in Shelter, “Baled Hay”, is frequently cited as the spark igniting the straw bale building revival. The same year Shelter was published another watershed moment occurred that revealed what was really at stake for many future natural builders: the 1973 Oil Crisis. A major oil embargo made it very hard to fill up a car with gasoline much less to affordably heat an inefficient home. This economic pressure spurred a lot of research and low-energy buildings. Even the White House put up solar panels. Unfortunately, when the crisis ended, so did the support for vernacular and new passive building technologies, which was hastened by the suppression of several complementary revolutionary movements and the deepening conservatism of many back-to- the-landers. Still, there remained an undercurrent of interest in moving away from fossil fuels, along with a deep well of new research on how to do so. Many natural building pioneers later cited this memory as the source of their drive for alternatives.

Reviving Natural Building

While the popular excitement for low-energy construction was shrinking in the 1970s, public funding for historic preservation research and renovation was increasing. This growth in research, which was happening in part thanks to the mid- century reappraisal of vernacular building and resulting fight for preservation, provided the final push for owner-builders inspired by countercultural publishing and the design/build programs to experiment with traditional building methods. Several localized-material-based-revivals began around this time: cordwood in 1980 with the publication of Rob Roy’s Cordwood Masonry Houses, partly instigated by historical vernacular building research from William Tishler’s 1979 interviews with older Wisconsin masons and the Northern Housing Committee’s guide to “stackwall”; straw bale in 1984 when Gary Strang’s Fine Homebuilding article about Jon Hammond’s straw bale studio (a project inspired by Welsch’s “Baled Hay”) came out; cob in 1989 when Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley, and Michael G. Smith founded the Cob Cottage Company; and light straw-clay in 1990 when Paula Baker-Laporte and Robert Laporte adapted post-war German reconstruction techniques into their Econest concept. The excitement around these revivals eventually coalesced into The Last Straw Journal, which was founded as a straw-building newsletter in 1992 by Judy Knox, Matts Myhrman, and Bill Blundell. This publication (which eventually became the magazine you’re reading now) quickly expanded its scope to cover many kinds of natural building, permaculture, ecological design, and the ethics motivating people to make the switch. In 1993, The Last Straw hosted the first natural building conference, focused on straw building, called “Roots and Revival” in Arthur, Nebraska. In the following 20 years, the major innovations and discoveries of natural building were worked out and codified in books and building codes. There was a noticeable lull in enthusiasm for natural building at some point in the early 2010s. Conversations in the last few years with elders of the movement have offered the following possible explanations: • The cost of building one’s own home increased so much after the 2008 recession that it just became infeasible for most likely owner-builders to try natural building. • Most of the earlier owner-builders were primarily interested in building their own natural home and then living an otherwise normal life, often leaving the community. This is not a great model for spreading a movement. • Some aspects of natural building, and some entire methods, could never grow beyond an enthusiast level in the global north due to the heavy labor needed. • There has never been a large and resilient network of natural building educators. The primary school for most methods has remained volunteer work parties and paid workshops, with challenging career paths. Despite all this, we are at the beginning of a second revival of natural building these last few years: new schools and land projects are starting, natural building Instagram accounts are growing, and new natural building design college programs are in development. There are at least a few reasons for this: • Carbon sequestration in buildings is gaining traction in the mainstream. Popular knowledge of sustainability, all the way up to the federal grant- making level and United Nations level, has moved from focusing just on a building’s energy efficiency to all the carbon emitted before and as it’s built. • While concerns about indoor air quality largely began with the recognition of “sick building syndrome” in the 1980s and have gradually grown with more consumer protection-oriented research, the last few years of massive wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic have driven indoor air pollution into mainstream conversations. This awareness is also uncovering materials’ overall health effects on those who manufacture them and use them in buildings. • The multifaceted ecological and social crises of “climate change” continue to develop, producing the hottest days on record, increasingly frequent zoonotic diseases, and exposing the fragility of material supply chains. Climate change has inspired plenty of false solutions and greenwashing whose hollowness is exposed each day. When this doesn’t just lead to fatalism, it angers people and drives them to find deeper and more comprehensive tactics. Decades of work by researchers, designers, builders, and experimenters have resulted in highly refined ideas of how to construct modern natural buildings. New schools and networks are forming to spread this knowledge and establish a professional base of natural builders and designers. Many of the original revivalists and organizations are even still with us. The movement must overcome what held it back before. As a growing number of people are coming to see, natural building is the legitimate and necessary response to the massive, urgent, and deep issues of our time. When they come, will we be ready?