Natural Building

Natural Building flows like poetry, rhyming and singing and rising its natural forms out from the Earth, made of the Earth herself.

This is the building I slept in when living at the Ecovillage Training Center on The Farm.
It stayed cool in Tennessee's hot summers, and warm-ish in the cold of winter. Its living roof reminds me of how a hobbit would build. Lying in bed felt like being cradled in the womb of Gaia herself.

From the Natural Building Network...

“Natural Building is any building system which places the highest value on social and environmental sustainability. It assumes the need to minimize the environmental impact of our housing and other supporting systems while providing healthy, beautiful, comfortable and spiritually uplifting homes for everyone.” Michael G. Smith

Natural Building is about using the resources we need and leaving the rest. You can create beautiful buildings that are safe, renewable and healthy, often for much less money than you might think - sometimes without debt or a mortgage.

Some of the materials used in Natural Building include: Strawbale, Cob, Straw-Clay, Cordwood, Bamboo, Timber Frame, Stone, Roundwood, Adobe, Earthbags, Rammed Earth, Underground, Salvaging & Scrounging, Recycling & Repurposing, Retrofitting & Remodeling, Environmentally-Preferable Products, Passive & Active Solar, Rainwater, Graywater, Composting Toilets, Blacksmithing...There are as many ways to approach natural building as there are people approaching it.

The Heartwood Homesteads blog of fellow ecovillager Wade Austin is in the works. Heartwood Homestead looks like it will be this natural builder's enthusiastic and informative documentation of his building and teaching experiences as his new business grows.

A post from Heartwood Homesteads:

A song to build a house by...

http://www.solarhaven.org/FrankMeyer.htm (I definitely recommend listening to this. )

This song will help you absolve all your ties to high VOC paints and flooring while encouraging the sort of angst one needs to pursue the alternatives.

“I like straw and I like clay, make mine natural anyday…I want a house that’s poison free, don’t sell me nothing on no TV.”