Posted on October 7, 2024

Miguel Elliott still recalls walking through the Rancho Petaluma Adobe on a fourth grade field trip.

“It was a super-hot day but it was cool within the structured earth walls of the fort and I thought ‘wow.’ It just fascinated me that by using earth from right under your feet, you could build something that was still standing all these years later.”

Fast forward to the mid-1990s. After college, he saw a video about making homes with straw, water and dirt. He had found his calling.

“Earth is the constant, the most basic thing we have to build with. It all just resonated, and I resolved to dedicate my life to it,” he said.

That passion has taken Elliott around the world, from Argentina to Africa, Thailand to Guatemala and the U.S. developing his skills in natural building. He is the founder of Cob on Maui in Petaluma. The mission of his business, founded in 2008, is to “construct high quality earthen structures using readily available resources, while encouraging community involvement through workshops and gatherings around the finished project.”

“Brown is the new green,” says Elliott, 50, who built a 120-square-foot cob house of his own on a ranch outside Sebastopol in west Sonoma County “Nothing is more sustainable. If you take a structure made of earthen, sun-dried material, protect it right with good sealer and a nice roof, it can last a long time. There are cob houses in England that are 700 years old, with many still being lived in.”

“Cob” is a seventeenth century English word meaning “lump” or a rounded mass of earth. To combine its essential ingredients of sand, clay-rich soil, water and straw, the material rests on waterproof tarp or in a tub and mixed in a “cob dance.”

“Cob is such a fun material to work with,” he explains. “You are not limited to squares. Earthen walls can have rounded, sensual shapes. You can make a bench fit your body, fashion an armrest or headrest for yourself, or carve a design into the surface. Stomping on the cob to mix it gives you a foot massage! When sculpting with it, you are kind of massaging the earth back. It’s a nice energy exchange.”

Elliott frames his cob structures with wood uprights (post-and-beam) to support the roof and wood pallets between the uprights. Straw between the uprights serves as insulation and its all covered with the earthen plaster.

Sometimes he can forage materials right from the site, as he did with the “Cob on Wood” center, a homeless village built under an Oakland highway overpass in 2021. (The structures were subsequently moved from the Caltrans property to city property a few blocks away and will soon be moved again to a permanent tiny house village on Wood Street in Oakland, according to Elliott.)

As for the durability of the material, Elliot said the classroom cluster he built at Academy at the PARC in Sebring, Florida weathered two hurricanes without any issues.

“We bolted the cabins to the decks, used hurricane ties on the roof to keep them stabilized from the winds, and put a hydraulic lime plaster on the walls which helped to protect from the rains.”

Cob structures are best protected by what Elliot explains as the “hat, jacket and boots” strategy: wide roof eaves to protect the walls and an impervious foundation.

Cob construction code

Elliott said the North Bay’s recent years of destructive wildfires is leading some contractors to look at non-toxic materials like adobe, cob, straw bale and other fire-resistant building techniques as an alternative to “tinderbox-type construction.”

The Cob Research Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Berkeley, has produced the world’s first complete model building code for cob construction. After many years of intensive collaboration with several universities and testing facilities, as well as dozens of cob builders, engineers, architects, and code specialists, the code was added as an appendix to the 2021 International Residential Code by the International Code Council.

“It is possible to get a permit now to build a small accessory dwelling unit in your own back yard, but you have to use those engineer drawings that have been created,” Elliott says.

One of the structural engineers who worked on research for the Cob Construction Appendix — Anthony Dente of Verdant Structural Engineers out of Oakland — helped Elliott get drawings for the way he builds an ADU.

“I now have those drawings for a 200-square-foot accessory dwelling that could be submitted to a local building department to get a permit to construct one of my designs legally.”

‘Sir Cobalot’

Elliott lived for four years at the Isis Oasis Retreat Center in Geyserville in northern Sonoma County, where he built the Hobbit Hut, Gingerbread House and several other cob structures around the property.

Within the Buddhist tradition, when an individual finds life purpose, the person can be knighted in the Order of the Green Tara. Because of his dedication, Elliott underwent this ceremony during which he declared his life’s purpose to spread natural building to the world. He was dubbed “Sir Cobalot” by the high priestess of the Temple of Isis.

Since then, Elliott has listed more than 250 creations — including benches, ovens, dome saunas, cabins and huts — in his “book of accoblishments.” He says, “I may hold the title of building more cob structures than anybody alive.”

Elliot spreads the word sometimes through workshops in cob construction to corporate clients as a team bonding experience.

“The great thing about such a project is that it doesn’t take a lot of money; the main investment is labor and the creative energy of the participants.”

He encourages corporations to consider having workers combine to make a tiny house or a pizza oven and then donate it to a shelter, a school, or a senior housing community.

Bruce King, author of five books, including “The New Carbon Architecture: Building to Cool the Planet” (2017) and “Build Beyond Zero” (2022), has been a structural engineer for 44 years, designing buildings of every size and type.

In 1999, he founded the San Rafael-based Ecological Building Network. EBNet connects the people doing research, experimentation and innovation with designers, builders, engineers and building officials who are interested in putting that information to work. King is familiar with the work of “Sir Cobalot.”

“Miguel Elliott is a noble soul, doing some very cool stuff, especially connected to housing the homeless,” King said. “He is trying hard to do the right thing, using cob as a vehicle. I really support him because he is not just talking but actually building stuff, trying to get roofs over people’s heads.”

The building industry is in the best position to make effective change because it uses ten times more physical “stuff” than any other industry, according to King.

“A price on carbon is emerging,” King said. “It is going to cost more and more to be an emitter. If you can make products or conduct your business in a way that reduces your emissions, especially compared to your competitors, or if your business stores carbon in its products, you will be at a market advantage in the new landscape.”

About the Miguel Elliotts of the world, Bruce King said this:

“What they bring to the table is low-carbon construction that is a large part of the answer to climate change. Natural building has a super short supply chain (you don’t move it very far), has a simple supply chain (you don’t cook it or pressurize it or add chemicals to it), it is cheap or free, and local (or just harvested from the landscape). That’s how human beings have built for most of history throughout most of the world. In many ways, we will return to those principals as we develop a crucial a climate-friendly architecture.”

Jennie Orvino is a grant writer and freelance journalist. Her book of poems, memoir and personal essays is “Poetry, Politics and Passion.” She blogs at www.jennieorvino.com and reach her at [email protected].

Original article