Cob Houses

"How can we separate your hands and hearts from ours in this clay of earth?"

-- Dr. Ramu Manivannan, Director, Buddha Smiles
Kurumbupallayam, Tamil Nadu, India, January 2004

Cob houses, it may interest you to know, are not made of corn cobs.

In the brick-burning village of Kurumbupallayam, Dr. Ramu Manivannan recently bought several large cow fields where he is building a school for poor and orphaned children. Kurumbupallayam is the village next to the ancestral home of his mother and a place where Mani, as Dr. Manivannan is known, has deep roots.

He prefers not to use the bricks of the local village, though, since mud, once it has been fired, does not peacefully release back to the earth. Like the International-style cement block houses going up as India prospers, brick becomes landfill material in a country with no landfills once its need has expired and the materials have failed. And even cement cannot indefinitely rebuff the monsoon that sweeps over the Eastern Ghats in June, returning in October along the same path. In fact, cement buildings in South India are most notable for their black moldy stains and walls puckered with humidity.

Cob, the material Mani has chosen for his school, has no pretensions of being as independent, as indifferent, as brick or cement. Cob is clay, sand, straw and water, mixed with bare feet on tarps or in pits, and pressed into the shape of walls. Cob walls require a good foundation, solid roof, and regular application of mud, lime or cow dung plaster. With care, a cob building can last hundreds of years.

Gandhi's ideas on care, trusteeship, and education are deeply interesting to Mani.

Mani's first cob schoolroom went up in January 2004 as part of a natural building workshop organized by Kleiwerks, Cob Works, and the natural building team from Buddhist monk Sulak Sivaraksa's ashram in Thailand. 150 banana trees were planted to filter graywater, and organic farming is envisioned as an integral part of the education of orphans and children whose parents are too poor to allow them to go to school. With Gandhian intent, just as these children will learn to read in the hours after their workday, they will continue to learn and practice the trades and crafts of their villages.

Like most of the 15 or so people who crawled across the planet to build a school in cob, and who returned home with clothing forever red-stained with the clay of South India, I discovered Mani's workshop on the World Wide Web at http://www.kleiwerks.com/.

Mani doesn't have a website, yet. But I am interested that he have one soon and I've begun to wonder, WWGD [What Would Gandhi Do] with this clay earth finely draped with the conduit for shared human intention?