Cottage Building in Cob Pise Chalk and Clay Part 1

Cottage Building in Cob, Pise, Chalk and Clay.

by Clough Williams-Ellis.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The exhaustion of the first edition of this book, within so short a time of its publication, makes it difficult to add much new matter for the reissue now called for, or, in the light of subsequent research and experience, to revise what had already been written.

Any book that seemed to show a way of meeting the present building difficulties, however partially, was fairly a.s.sured of a welcome, but the somewhat unforeseen demand for my small contribution to the great volume of literature on cottage-building is, I think, to be attributed chiefly to its description of Pise-building.

Of the very large number of letters that reach me from readers of the book, quite ninety-nine out of every hundred are concerned with Pise.

The other methods of building have their advocates and exponents, but it is clearly Pise that has caught the attention of the public as well as of the Press both at home and abroad, and it is to this method of construction that I have chiefly devoted my attention since the writing of the book as it first appeared.

In our English climate Pise-building is a summer craft, and the small-scale experiments of one person through a single summer cannot in the nature of things add very greatly to the sum of our knowledge of what is possible with Pise and of what is not.

Most of the new data have come through the building of Mr. Strachey's demonstration house, an account of which is included in the present volume.

At the time of writing, various tests are being carried out with the help of the National Physical Laboratory; but the results, though exceedingly encouraging, are not yet ready for publication.[1]

The fact that Pise-building is essentially a "Dry-earth method" makes necessary the creation of artificial summer conditions under which the experiments may be conducted during the past winter. As a result of these researches, a considerable ma.s.s of useful data has become available for the opening of the present building season.[2]

Much helpful information is also likely to come to us from the Colonies, particularly from Rhodesia and British East Africa, where there is great activity in Pise-building, and where there is no "close season" such as our winter imposes upon us here.

It is instructive also to note that great interest in Pise-building has been aroused in Canada and in Scandinavia, the two countries that we were wont to a.s.sociate particularly with timber-building.

From both I have received a number of letters complaining of "the lumber shortage," and discussing the advantages of Pise as compared with their traditional wood-construction.

If these great timber countries are themselves feeling the pinch, the advocates of wooden houses for England may find that they are not merely barking up the wrong tree, but up a tree that is not even there.

The timber famine is, in any case, a calamity to anyone dependent on building, that is to everyone, for even a Pise house must still have a roof and floors and joinery.

But to invoke the timber house as our salvation under existing conditions seems to be singularly perverse and unhelpful. Pise, at all events, seems to offer us a more promising field for exploration than most of the other heterodox methods of construction that have been suggested, too often upon credentials that will not bear any but the most cursory scrutiny.

Pise, even now, is still in its experimental infancy.

It has yet to prove itself in the fields of National Housing and of compet.i.tive commercial building schemes on a large scale.

Lastly, Pise does not claim to solve the housing problem. There is no solution unless, by some miracle, the present purchasing power of the sovereign appreciates by 200 per cent.

CLOUGH WILLIAMS-ELLIS.

22, South Eaton Place, London, S.W.1.

_May 1920._

[Footnote 1: Certain of these have since been issued and will be found in Appendix IV. at the end of the book.]

[Footnote 2: See Appendix IV.]

CONSIDERATIONS

"IF ALL AVAILABLE BRICKWORKS WERE TO PRODUCE AT THEIR HIGHEST LIMIT OF OUTPUT AND WITH ALL THE LABOUR THEY WANTED AT THEIR DISPOSAL THEY COULD ONLY TURN OUT 4,000,000,000 BRICKS IN A YEAR AS AGAINST A PRE-WAR AVERAGE OF 2,800,000,000."--(_See Report by Committee appointed by Ministry of Reconstruction to consider the post-war position of building._)

The first year's programme of working-cla.s.s housing _alone_ calls for at least 6,000,000,000 bricks. That is to say, unless wall materials other than brick are freely used, we shall fall alarmingly short of what the population of Great Britain needs in bare accommodation, and all building and engineering projects whatsoever other than housing must be postponed indefinitely.

"THE COUNTRY DISTRICTS OF ENGLAND AND WALES ARE UNSURPa.s.sED FOR VARIETY AND BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, AND IT WOULD BE NOTHING LESS THAN A NATIONAL MISFORTUNE IF THE INCREASED DEVELOPMENT OF SMALL HOLDINGS WERE TO RESULT IN THE ERECTION OF BUILDINGS UNSUITED TO THEIR ENVIRONMENT AND UGLY IN APPEARANCE."--(_Extract from the report submitted by the Departmental Committee appointed to inquire as to Buildings for Small Holdings, 1913._)

INTRODUCTION

I

The country is faced by a dilemma probably greater and more poignant than any with which it has. .h.i.therto had to deal. It needs, and needs at once, a million new houses, and it has not only utterly inadequate stores of material with which to build them, but has not even the plant by which that material can be rapidly created. There is not merely a shortage, but an actual famine everywhere as regards the things out of which houses are made. Bricks are wanted by the ten thousand million, but there are practically no bricks in sight. All that the brickyards of the United Kingdom can do, working all day and every day, is to turn out something like four thousand million a year. But to those who want houses at once, what is the use of a promise of bricks in five years'

time? To tell them to turn to the stone quarries is a mere derision. Let alone the cost of work and of transport, it is only in a few favoured places that the rocks will give us what we want. Needless to say we are short, too, of lime and cement, and probably shall be shorter. _No coal, no quicklime_, and _No coal, no cement_, and as things look now, it is going to be a case, if not of no coal, at any rate of much less coal.

Even worse is the shortage in timber--the material hitherto deemed essential for the making of roofs, doors, windows and floors. Raw timber is hardly obtainable, and seasoned timber does not exist. The same story has to be told about tiles, slates, corrugated iron, and every other form of "legitimate" roofing substance. There are none to be had.

In this dread predicament what are we to do as a nation? What we must not do is at any rate quite clear. We must not lie down in the high road of civilisation and cry out that we are ruined or betrayed, or that the world is too hard for us, and that we must give up the task of living in houses. Whether we like it or not we have got to do something about the housing question, and we have got to do it at once, and there is an end.

Translated into terms of action, this means that as we have not got enough of the old forms of material we must turn to others and learn how to house ourselves with materials such as we have not used before. Once again necessity must be the mother of invention, or rather, of invention and revival, for in anything so old and universal as the housing problem it is too late to be ambitious. Here we always find that there has been an ancient a.s.syrian or Egyptian or a primitive man in front of us.

It is the object of the present book to attack part of the problem of how to build without bricks, and indeed without mortar, and equally important, as far as possible without the vast cost of transporting the heavy material of the house from one quarter of England to another. That is my apology for introducing to the public a work dealing with what I can hear old-fashioned master-builders describing as the "b.a.s.t.a.r.d" forms of construction. One of these is Pise de terre, the old system of building with walls formed of rammed or compressed earth: a system which was once known throughout Europe and of which the primitive tribesmen of Arizona and New Mexico knew the secret. Down to our own day it has been practised with wonderful success in the Valley of the Rhone. Then come our own cob, once the cottage material _par excellence_ of Devonshire and the West of England, our system of building with plain clay blocks, a plan indigenous in the Eastern counties, and again the use of chalk and chalk pise.

[Headnote: The Search for Cheap Material]

PISe DE TERRE

For me Pise de terre, ever since I heard of it, has offered special attractions. It, and it alone provides, or if one must be cautious, appears to provide the way to turn an old dream of mine and of many other people into a reality. My connection with the problem of housing, and especially of rural housing, _i.e._ cottage housing, now nearly a quarter of a century old, has been on the side of cheap material.

Rightly or wrongly (I know that many great experts in building matters think quite wrongly), I have had the simplicity to believe that if you are to get cheap housing you must get it by the use of cheap material.

It has always seemed to me that there is no other way. What more natural than first to ask why building material was so dear, and then what was the cause of its dearness? I found it in the fact that bricks are very expensive things to make, that stones are very expensive things to quarry, that cements are very expensive things to manufacture, and worst of all, that all these things are very heavy and very expensive to drag about the country, and to "dump" on the site in some lonely situation where cottages or a small-holder's house and outbuildings are, to use the conventional phrase, "urgently demanded." Therefore, to the unfeigned amus.e.m.e.nt, nay, contempt of all my architectural friends, I spent a great deal of my leisure in the years before the war in racking my brains in the search for cheap material. My deep desire was to find something in the earth out of which walls could be made. My ideal was a man or group of men with spades and pickaxes coming upon the land and creating the walls of a house out of what they found there.

I wanted my house, my cottage in "Cloud-Cuckoo Land," to rise like the lark from the furrows. But I was at once dissuaded from my purpose by cautious and scientific persons. The chemists, if they did not scoff like the architects, were visibly perturbed. "Your dream is impossible,"

they said. "Nature abhors it as much as she used to be supposed to abhor a vacuum. If your soil is clay, and you can afford the time and cost of erecting kilns, and bringing coal to the spot to make the bricks, you can no doubt turn the earth on the spot into a house, but even then you had far better buy them of those that sell. Your dream of having some chemical which will mix with the earth and turn it into a kind of stone, is the merest delusion. It is the nature of the earth to kill anything in the way of cement that is mixed with it. For example, even a little earth will kill concrete or mortar. Unless you wash your sand most carefully, and free it from all earth stain, you will ruin your concrete blocks." I appeared to be literally "up against" a brick wall. It was that or nothing. And then, and when things seemed at their very worst, a kind correspondent of _The Spectator_ showed me a way of escape.

I felt like a man lost in underground pa.s.sages who suddenly sees a tiny square of light and knows that it means the way out. Somebody wrote, from South Africa I think, asking why I didn't find the thing I wanted in Pise de terre, much used in Australia, and occasionally in Cape Colony. Then came a rush of enlightenment. People who had seen and even lived in such houses wrote to _The Spectator_, and the world indeed for the moment seemed alive with Pise de terre. I was even lent the "Farmer's Handbook" of New South Wales, in which the State Government provides settlers with an elaborate description of how to build in Pise, and how to make the necessary shuttering for doing so. It was then, too, that I began to hear of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century buildings of Pise in the Rhone Valley. In fact, everybody but I seemed to know all there was to be known about Pise de terre. For the moment indeed, the situation seemed like that described in _Punch's_ famous picture of the young lady and the German professor. "_What is Volapuk?_" asks the young lady. "_Ze universal language_," says the professor. "_Where is it spoken?_" "_No vairs._" Pise de terre appeared to be the universal system of building, but as far as I could make out, it was practised "no vairs," or at any rate not in Europe.

[Headnote: Experiments with "Pise"]

II

I had got as far as the position described above, when down swept the war upon Europe, and everything had to be postponed in favour of the immediate need of filling the ranks of the nation's army and teaching the men how to fight our enemies. As the war went on, however, the demand for rapid, cheap, and temporary building became very great, and I felt I should be justified in trying some experiments with Pise de terre, even in spite of the difficulty of obtaining labour.

I think I can best ill.u.s.trate the nature of Pise and what it can do, and I believe will do, if I shortly recount in chronological order these humble pioneer efforts.