May/June 2002 Living Now
Sacred Spaces and Cob

by Joshua Klyber

Spirituality starts in the home. The creation of our living environment reflects our inner sense of self. Whether we live in a messy home, an obsessively organized one, whether it feels light or subdued and heavy, it reflects and affects the moods of the people who live within it. It is the place where we spend a major part of our time, and it too should be unified into our holistic manner of living.

It is difficult to do this in an urban setting, where we are very removed from the construction of our houses. They are already built when we buy them. Most people have no intimate knowledge of how this complicated set of codes gets assembled into a house. The houses are designed to be a shell separating us from the elements, sealing the air within and the water without. How can we maintain a connection to the Earth Mother when we are isolated from nature and our community within our wooden boxes?

One answer to this is Cob construction. Cob is an ancient earthen building technique used in Persia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Knowledge of this style of home building has been traditionally passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. Cob is a way to make a home out of the materials that the Earth Mother provides--clay, sand, straw and water. There is something magical about being able to create a sacred space from the materials gathered at the site, within a minimum of embodied energy.

The embodiment of energy in constructions is almost always overlooked. There is a great expenditure of energy put into a single 2x4: cutting the tree, transporting it to a mill, cutting it into a 2x4, transporting it to several intermediate warehouses before the lumber store, and finally into your hands. There’s too much processing involved. With cob, we use the clay from the site and the embodied energy of that ground is made into the walls of the sacred space, Cob joins these two realms, that of the Earth Mother and that of our creation, so that they can be closer to unity.

The very method of constructing with cob roots our experience in that of the Earth. Similar to Amish barn raisings, it takes a community to come together to build with cob. It is a ritual of convergence of community members to focus energies upon the creation of sacred space. It is adding our own energy to the mixing of the materials, mixing by foot, so that we are part of the structure. Building up the walls of the structure, each piece of earth passes through our hands. There is not any material that is foreign in this simple process.

The sacred spaces being built of cob are very organic in nature. Cob lends itself to being sculpted; as a result, very few cob spaces have straight walls. Instead they take inspiration from the Earth Mother and its archetypal combinations of order and chaos. These sacred spaces are created with driftwood logs for rooflines, shrines carved into walls, and sacred geometry ground plans. The entire sacred space is organic; it isn’t hermetically sealed like other houses, but allows moisture and air to breathe through the walls.

Cob is a simple technique to learn, and allows for endless creativity. Households are learning to create their own sanctuaries in their backyards. For these reasons and many more, Cob is an emergent technology that is gaining in popularity in an urban context here in Portland.

Joshua Klyber works with sacred spaces and their creation. He is currently involved with Cob building at People’s Food Co-op, and the upcoming Natural Building Convergence. For information on free hands-on workshops contact Joshua at Joshuaism@yahoo.com, or (503)287-5694.