Michael Smith is one of the true experts of the natural building movement. His storied career has spanned decades and a broad spectrum of building methods. Through his teaching and his books Michael has educated a generation of earthen builders. In this piece he reflects on his experiences and the lessons he learned along the way about imparting natural building methods to young folks.
Although fundamental human needs and the physical constraints and resources of our environment have remained fairly constant for millennia, our changing society has radically altered the way people learn to build. The knowledge that was once the heritage of all cultures – available to everyone for free mainly as a result of the natural inquisitiveness of children – became incrementally less intuitive and more convoluted as it moved into the protected enclave of professional designers and builders. The Natural Building movement has recently attempted to reverse that trend by returning construction to the shared proprietorship of all humans. One of the major tools for that transformation is the natural building workshop. It’s hard for me to believe that this is my 32nd year of teaching Natural Building. I haven’t kept a careful count, but I would guess that I have led well over 150 hands-on workshops, ranging from one-day earthen oven workshops for children to three-month intensive courses for professional builders. I’ve taught close to two thousand people how to build with cob, adobe, stone, earthbags, roundwood, cordwood masonry, timber framing, straw bales, light straw-clay, wattle-and-daub, chip-and-slip, bark-and-clay, ricecrete, living roofs, earthen floors, natural plasters and/or paints. Using these techniques as object lessons, I try to help learners develop relationships with the original teachers – including earth, stone, wood, and straw – and participate in a continuous stream of tradition and innovation going back thousands of years. Many aspects of our society have changed in just the three decades since I began this work. In that time I have seen exponential increases in access to information from around the world, changes in societal expectations regarding the value of instruction, and the systematization, synthesis, and scientization of many aspects of human endeavor, including building. I’d like to share my perspective on how Natural Building education has evolved in response to these changes, and where it might be going next.
The Pioneering Stage
In the spring of 1993, I joined the Cob Cottage Company (CCC) in Oregon just in time for their inaugural workshop. Within a couple of months, I was co-teaching with founder Ianto Evans, (thereby doubling the size of the teaching staff), and by the following year, I was leading workshops for CCC. It wasn’t that I knew very much – I had zero experience with earthen construction before that time – but nearly everyone else seemed to know even less. The term “cob” was almost unheard of in the United States in the early 90’s. Other Natural Building systems were more familiar, but mostly within limited geographical regions. A timber framing tradition was still intact in the Northeast, adobe was well known, straw bale was beginning its revival in the Southwest, and rammed earth was making inroads in California. But remember, this was before the internet, and information on any of these techniques was hard to come by. Although Lloyd Kahn’s inspirational scrapbook “Shelter” was published in 1973, followed by a few more instructional books on adobe, timber framing, cordwood masonry, and underground houses during in the 1970s and ’80s, the first books on straw bale construction weren’t released until 1994. There had never been a how-to book on cob until both Becky Bee and I independently self-published guidebooks in 1997. (Now there are at least six!) With Ianto, his wife Linda Smiley, and a rotating team of apprentices, I spent the mid-90s teaching hands-on cob workshops everywhere from California to British Columbia to Colorado. At that time, most people attending workshops found out about them through word of mouth, from an article in a local newspaper, or a flier at a health food store. Many people had a general sense that there were serious environmental problems with the conventional building industry and were grasping for possible ways to afford a healthier home. Cob might have been the first alternative building system they heard about, but it was not necessarily the best solution to their problems. A small minority of our students went on to build cob homes for themselves. But we soon realized that technical how- to was only one of several things that students were looking for. Equally attractive was the opportunity to connect with other people with similar interests – to build relationships and community. And to step outside their established routines to experience different ways of relating to their bodies, the physical environment, and other people. Ianto was particularly adept at weaving social and environmental messages into building instruction, and these were often the most valuable lessons that students walked away with. Wherever we taught, we heard rumors about other maverick builders doing interesting things with natural materials. We met Sun Ray Kelly at a hot spring in Oregon and were blown away by his sculptural use of natural roundwood. At N O 7 6 43 Penny Livingston’s Permaculture Institute of Northern California, we collaborated with Robert Laporte on a hybrid cob and light straw clay (LSC) office. Although some of them were already teaching workshops, there was little connection or communication between teachers and practitioners, especially of different techniques. Essentially, there were a handful of pioneers teaching the one or two techniques they knew and ignoring or even maligning those they were less familiar with. Students attending a workshop on cob might walk away with a vague and inaccurate negative perception of straw bale, or vice versa. Ianto had the idea of inviting this scattered group of colleagues to a gathering to see what we could learn from one another, so in October of 1994 we hosted the “Alternative Building Colloquium” on the farm where I was living in Cottage Grove, Oregon. About 100 people came for the week, camping out in a field with almost no amenities and freezing nighttime temperatures. We built a straw bale “Coliseum” to hold evening presentations, experimented with a straw bale sweat lodge, and held mini-workshops on cob, straw bale, LSC, earthen floors, timber framing, and more. One of the stated purposes of the Colloquium was to reduce the feeling of competition between practitioners of different “alternative” building systems and replace it with a sense of collaboration and community. It worked!
The Natural Building Coalition
One enthusiastic participant at the first Colloquium in Oregon was Catherine Wanek, who had been making videos about straw bale construction (and later became the publisher of The Last Straw). She offered to host a follow-up gathering the next year at her Black Range Lodge in New Mexico. When considering what to call that event, she rejected the term “alternative” because building with local, unprocessed materials had been the historical norm everywhere and was still common in less-affluent areas of the globe. She chose to call the 1995 gathering “The Natural Building Colloquium” – the first usage of the phrase “Natural Building.” The gathering attracted multiple returnees from the Oregon Colloquium and added quite a few straw bale and adobe enthusiasts from the Southwest while expanding the focus to include sustainable energy and human waste management. Nearly every year for the next decade (and more occasionally since), a rotating crew hosted Natural Building Colloquia on several sites in Oregon, New Mexico, California, Texas, and BC. It is not an 44 exaggeration to state that the Colloquia birthed the Natural Building movement as we know it today. Many attendees arrived with limited experience in a single building modality and left with a sense of belonging to something immensely bigger and more important, a building tradition which reaches back to our most distant ancestors around the globe and forward into a sustainable future. The meetings of minds and hands at these events helped to hash out an understanding of how building science applies to natural materials and to propagate best practices in everything from straw bale framing details to earthen floor sealing protocols. Naturally, this synthesis and systematization spilled over into workshops. The parochial attitude of “my system is the best” was largely replaced by a broader perspective on how each alternative fits into the continuum of natural wall systems – from dense earthen wall systems like rammed earth and cob with their high thermal mass to lighter, more insulating systems like straw bale and LSC – and where each might be most appropriate. Hybrid buildings incorporating multiple techniques became more common. Some of us began to teach Natural Building from a whole-systems perspective, giving students an overview of essential design concepts, a foundation in the basic materials, and many examples of how to assemble these into buildings. Our attempts to assemble reading materials for those workshops eventually snowballed into the book The Art of Natural Building, co-edited by Joe Kennedy (whose early experience was with earthbags as Nader Khalili’s right hand man at Cal-EARTH), Catherine Wanek (who entered via strawbale) and myself (who had stumbled through the cob portal). Combining the perspectives and experience of dozens of practitioners working with as many different techniques, the book offered students and teachers a systematic perspective on the emerging field of Natural Building. The years immediately before and after the turn of the millennium saw a huge expansion of Natural Building knowledge and education, with many new teachers, techniques and examples being added to the mixture. Teachers and students traversing the planet merged their evolving systematic understanding with local traditions and conditions on every continent. New books were coming out every year, new educational organizations were popping up like mushrooms and the rising internet was becoming a major force in spreading information. Due to high demand for education, different teachers and organizations were able to N O 7 6 focus on their strengths, be they technical, design systems, social, or environmental education.
Projects and Centers
One of the fundamental challenges of Natural Building education has always been that the most effective way to learn to build is by doing it – under the proper conditions and with experienced guidance. This is precisely what distinguishes a hands-on workshop from any number of hours of YouTube browsing, but it does create logistical issues for organizers and teachers. Most Natural Building workshops take place as part of a construction project. Since the workshop must be advertised well in advance with certain implicit or explicit educational goals, it becomes necessary to get the project to the point where those goals can be realized at the predetermined time. Nearly always this causes stress and complications. For example, I have lately been teaching a lot of natural plaster workshops, but I am not generally on site full time before the workshop and in charge of the construction process and sequence. It often happens that the stage of completion of the building is not where it should ideally be to apply finish plaster. Compromises must be made to provide the best possible learning experience under the circumstances. Sometimes these trade-offs can be severe. Once I was hired to lead a workshop in which both cob and straw bale walls of a small home would be built. When I arrived on site, I did not consider the foundation to be safe. It was too late to demolish and rebuild the foundation and still be able to teach wall construction, so we decided to proceed with a lot of caveats to the students. Situations like this have made me increasingly selective about what projects I get involved with. It never feels great to have to tell students, “What should have been done here is…” It is much more satisfying to demonstrate best practices from the ground up. Sometimes teachers avoid these complications by focusing on skill-building without a real-world construction project. For example, students in some plastering workshops apply plaster only to practice boards rather than to a real building. A couple of decades ago it was common practice at straw bale workshops to assemble a small model building, which was then deconstructed, and the parts saved for the next workshop. Certainly, basic construction concepts and skills can be imparted this way, but 45 there are major disadvantages for the students. There is an enormous sense of personal and collective empowerment when workshop participants are invited to contribute to the construction of a permanent building. Nearly everyone takes this responsibility seriously and it can motivate people to learn quickly, work hard, and surmount their own feelings of incompetence. I love the profound feeling of service and interconnection that comes when a workshop helps build a house for people who really need one. After learning many challenging lessons during my first six years of teaching, I was determined to be part of a learning center where natural building and permaculture workshops would be integrated with other aspects of sustainable living for the benefit of both students and instructors. By designing buildings and training programs in tandem with each other and by having greater control over the entire building process from start to finish, I expected to avoid many of the compromises and contradictions I had experienced in workshops hosted by other people. From 1999 through 2010, I lived at Emerald Earth Sanctuary in Northern California. Along with Darryl Berlin, Sara McCamant and other residents and teachers, we constructed a dozen natural buildings and led many workshops. It was a huge benefit to learners to be able to work on several buildings at different stages of completion in rapid succession and to see and use completed natural buildings on the same site. Living for more than a decade in natural buildings I had designed and built taught me a huge amount about how buildings wear over time, how decisions about design, materials and techniques can impact the utility and appearance of a building many years later. And I delighted in being able to offer students a glimpse of natural buildings in a context where they made sense as one part of a holistic effort to build a healthy future, including regenerative food production, off-grid power generation and waste management, and collective ownership and decision-making structures. After eleven years my life path carried me away from Emerald Earth, but I continue to enjoy teaching and building at communities and demonstration centers including, most recently, Wanosh Forest Gardens. There are very few other places like this that I’m familiar with: OUR Ecovillage in BC, Quail Springs in Southern California, Dancing Rabbit in Missouri, Las Cañadas in Veracruz, Mexico, Rancho Mastatal in Costa Rica… I wish there were more.
What are workshops for?
There have always been three major reasons that people come to Natural Building workshops:
to satisfy a general curiosity about Natural Building and sustainable living;
to learn specific practical skills; and
