Ross Brubeck is a builder with the woods edge natural builders collective. He is in the process of finishing his first earthen home.
“Natural Building” is a clunky term. Much like “organic” or “sustainable”, it’s drawn from a stablehouse of easy greenwashing terms cheaply deployed next to a green leaf on a plastic package. What part of “nature” is reflected in “natural building” more so than the built environment we are already in? The materials used in natural building processes are less refined, one might say; but what is the delimiting level or process of refinement? Does cross-laminated timber a natural skyscraper make? Would a wooden skyscraper help to curb the runaway city-highway-tarmac building happening globally, and reverse the pervasive alienation felt by so many in a world which is (as sung by countless many in a decades-long lamentation) moving too quickly, yet quicker every day?
The term “natural building” breaks down into two sentiments for me. For one - it asserts that everything one needs to live a thoroughly healthy life is not only already available, it in many cases is freely available, and often closer to hand than most would think. Secondly, it is advocacy for an un-standardizeable form of placemaking. Through standardization, industrial infrastructures minimize the expenditure of time, and over time do it more efficiently. In this light, the impact of the global construction industry is only a dash of useful (or even useable) floor-space, and a cubic yard of practically eternal glass fiber reinforced cast stone and entombed steel, on a flattened impermeable floodplain.
Me - what do I want? A nice home. What is a nice home? Something that is built up with the intention to serve the maslovian big three - food, shelter, community. Whats the best way to get that? Probably, for me, since I had no money, but a little bit of space, a lot of time during a global quarantine, and a will to learn, was to build it, with the help of as many of my friends as I could wrangle. Because dirt needed to be removed from the foundation, there was dirt available to build and finish the walls. Because three 60-foot pine trees needed to be felled to clear space for construction, all the wood needed was derived and milled on-site. Me, I’ve seen every part of this place we built.
The house isn’t finished, but it’s very nice, and I feel like I fit very neatly and comfortably in it. I feel good inside of it, because I recognize it - not only the way its form shows the idea I had about it before beginning, but I also recognize the materials as being deeply, maybe biologically familiar. It has taken longer than it would have “conventionally”, and I’ve put in much more sweat than had it been built conventionally, but I recognize my house, and feel the intention embodied in it as a tuned resonance.
There are times when it's good to let things come slowly. As it exists in the world, there is no industrial support for creating spaces made of naturally derived materials. By the "nature" of it, each made-place demands to be unique. Meeting needs on a personalized, fundamental level is, much like “natural building” as a catch-all, is clunky and cumbersome at first glance. But by the nature of it, comfortable, stable, and perhaps most strikingly, deeply familiar environments, highly attuned to the builders' very intention are what end up being created. Their character is seen immediately, and then grows over time, like a sort of ecosystem.
Good housing is an essential part of one's well being! We in the collective work towards a future where there is widespread understanding of the impact housing has on health throughout one's life, and where the extent to which one has been favored by our economic system has no bearing on the quality of the place where one sleeps, eats, cooks, reads, loves - all the foundational stuff.
-rb
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