Speaker 1:	Good afternoon, everyone. I want to welcome you all to this presentation by Massey Burke. Before introduce Massey, I thought the most important thing to do would be to just express my gratitude, all of our gratitude, for the folks who have contributed to making this project possible. So, I've got a nice list here that I'm going to read and I don't want to miss anybody's name but this really has meant a lot to us, all of the people who have been able to help us. 
	So, first things first, I need to thank the editor of Swarthmore Magazine, who's article on Massey Burke gave me the idea to invite her here to do the project. It was just that article, seeing the work that she was doing and how relative it was to the work that I was doing with students in the Container as Architecture class, so a big thank you to the Swarthmore Magazine. 
	Then the one thing that I continue to marvel at, is the Cooper Foundation that Swarthmore College has a foundation that allows any one of us to have an idea, and apply for money, and be able to get that idea realized through the funding that they provide. So a great big thank you to the Cooper Foundation and that committee.
	Then, whenever you get the funding, you have to get the job done. So there's a lot of people who have just put their hands in this thing in more ways than one, to get this job done. Many thanks go to Claire Sawyers and Jeff Jabcoe, of the Scott Arboretum, because they allowed us the space. That's the first thing, you're gonna do something like this, anybody who does sculpture knows where are you gonna put it. So, we were able to get a good site right outside of Beardsley. Also, from the Scott Arboretum, Dwight Darko. This is a person who was always there, no matter what. We would say his name and the man would just appear and get things done for us. So, a special thanks for Dwight, even though he isn't here. 
	Then, in terms of just mysterious things happening, we needed some of the straw shredded and miraculously, someone appeared with a lawn mower and then one of the grounds people showed up with his giant lawnmower and shredded this for us, shredded it into the perfect one inch length that we needed. So, just whoever that mysterious lawnmower guy is, I want to just say thank you to him.
	To Andrea Packard, who designed the poster that you've all been seeing around campus, and she just has attracted so much attention to this through that, so I want to thank her for doing that. I also want to thank Mike Boyd from facilities, he was the first person who Andrea ... Not Andrea, who Massey started to have all of the conversations with about how to get this thing done. So, a big thank you for that.
	Then, of course, to all of the students and the friends and the neighbors, who came from all over the place. From long and far ... From distance and nearby and I just want to thank you. This really, really showed just how much the visual arts is valued for our students, just to get students out there and they came out there in the rain and the muck and in their bare feet and they made this thing happen and I really, really want to thank you. I don't use this word, ever, but I'm going to say it today. Awesome. It was just great. 
	Then, I want to say a special thank you to Karen Fitzsimmons, who's sitting right there in the back. She traveled from her home in California to work with Massey as her assistant on the project and what's important about my connection with Karen is what she's taught me. She not only taught me how to make the cob and put it on the wall to make the wall strong and beautiful, but she's one of those amazing people who have learned how to just live really close to the ground, to the earth, and to just take what she needs and no more. I just ... That was just something so moving, for me, to just meet someone who not only talks the talk, but she walks the walk, and I just want you guys to know that's an impressive woman over there and if you get a chance, make sure you get a chance to talk to her before she leaves on Friday. 
	Then, here's something that is an absolute truth. With every project, there has to be someone who's going to help you make it happen. No matter what you've got in place, you need someone and that person ... You can call that person and I've got a little list of names here. That person could be your coordinator, could be your facilitator, an enabler, an ally, and lately they've been called fixers, which I like that one. But whatever you call that person, they're indispensable to your success. In the case of our wall, that person has been Mr. Stu Heine, right there in the back. 
	I just wanted to express our gratitude, all of our gratitude, to how he's been able to just make things happen for the project. From materials, to mobilizing his people to help us, to just get something like that done. And I think that a lot of it is coming from ... I hope I'm not just putting words in his mouth, but coming from his sense of the value of having these visual symbols on campus and what they do for our community in terms of the values that we want to express. I just want to just say thank you, Stu Heine, for everything that you've done and continue to do for this project. 
	Then, that brings me to Massey. This is the person, of course, who has been the voice behind this whole project and as many of you know, Massey Burke is an alum of the college, Class of 2000, she was a classics major here, in addition to doing work in the art department as a painter. She studied with Randy Exon and Celia Riceman. Her path, leading her away from Swarthmore, and then back again after 12 years, has literally taken her around the world, beginning with a year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, travels in India, and in the Himalayas and ultimately, taking her to Northern California, where she presently makes her home in El Sobrante. 
	In Northern California, she studied at the Solar Living Institute, later apprenticing with Michael Smith, who is the founder of the Cobb Cottage Company. That's the first company offering vernacular building as an alternative to conventional construction techniques in home renovation and in new construction. She continued her practice in teaching hands on workshops, and earthen building in Northern California, Washington state, Mexico and just basically around the country, teaching people how to do this. I just wanted to give you a little bit more of what she's been up to, because it has been a lot. 
	Three years ago, she, along with her partner, working partner, Sasha Rabin, she established Vertical Clay, a company specializing in construction using vernacular building techniques. She has lectured on natural building at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Clay Works International. She designed a community center for the Hopi reservation in Arizona, and continues to work with Builders Without Borders. She currently is teaching at the University of San Francisco, architecture and engineering department and the University of Santa Clara Department of Engineering. Current projects include an earth and pagoda for Clark's Island in Lake County, California, and the remodeling of a conventional building using earth and construction on the site of her own home in Villa Sobrante. 
	It's impossible to say why these kinds of things work out the way they do, but just suffice it to say, that Massey's presence here at Swarthmore, ties in with several lines of thinking that are really important to us at Swarthmore right now, and the first being an increasing interest in architecture across the disciplines. I've heard many conversations from mathematicians, to sociologists, to a number of people who are integrating architecture into their syllabi. 
	The second being the conversation, a big conversation, on strategic planning, as it addresses knowledge, teaching and learning. And the third being the global conversation on sustainability and our environment, an issue that is of particular importance to all of us here in the community. It doesn't take a lot of vision to see the practice of earthen building as being at the intersection of so many important lines of thinking here at the college. So, with that, I give you Massey Burke, earth builder.
Massey Burke:	Well, I have one more thank you to give, and that's to Sid, for having the idea to bring me back.
Speaker 1:	That wasn't easy.
Massey Burke:	Well, and also to put up with me for two weeks, which has been ... I've had a great time, so thank you so much.
Speaker 1:	I don't think any of us have been suffering. 
Massey Burke:	Okay, good. Al right. When I got here I was asking Sid about my presentation and okay, there's a lot of different ways you can tell the story of earthen building and what it's about and Sid summarized some of that, why I do this stuff, which is a large part of my presentation. And Sid said, "Well, this is your chance to have a manifesto." So I said, "Oh, I better come up with a manifesto." 
	So, I call this talk my Mud Manifesto. If you're going to make a manifesto, or present a manifesto, then you better say something provocative to start it, I guess. So, I'm going to make the claim that natural building ... And I'll talk more about what natural building is. Natural building, among other tools, has great power to turn the boat around environmentally for our culture. And I'm going to attempt to express to you why I think so, after I tell you what natural building is and show you some of the pictures of what I've done with it.
	Natural building, is the art of building with stuff that's around you. Some of the pictures that I'll show you in a bit will be traditional expressions of that art. But it utilizes a few very basic things. One of the fun things about this presentation is that I'm talking to a lot of people who have been working with me all week, so you know a lot about this already. But natural building ... I would say the backbone of natural building is clay soils. Clay soils aren't necessarily potters clay. Clay soils are almost ubiquitous on the surface of the earth, they're very easy to come by, unless you live in an area that's geologically very young. And so clay soils generally are the mineral subsoil wherever you are. 
	And so it's mineral soil with enough clay content to be sticky for construction. That is ingredient number one in natural building. And again, I'll get to this in a bit, but as you can imagine this is used very differently in different places even though it's probably the most consistent ingredient in natural construction. Anyway, ingredient number two is straw. This is sort of interesting because we live in a culture that practices industrial agriculture, which means that we have a lot of straw around that's considered a waste product. I'm going to resist a tangent right here, but that's not true in many parts of the world. I've had people who practice natural building in other cultures come to America and say, "Oh my goodness, you're making these expensive buildings," because they're making straw bale buildings. They don't have that kind of straw around. But, for our purposes, straw is the number two ingredient in almost any type of natural building.
	The third ingredient is sand and or gravel. Straw and sand are added to the clay to balance out it's tendency to shrink and the fact that it doesn't have a lot of tinsel strength, so it doesn't have a lot of strength to pulling forces. So those are the big three. When you're building vernacular building, you're probably using those ingredients in some form. And that's what we did this week. There are obviously other ingredients. There are many other things that could be considered part of natural building. Other common ingredients, what I call non industrial wood. A lot of natural builders get into natural building because we don't want to build with wood, then you figure out you've got to make a roof. So, you learn carpentry backwards or whatever. 
	But what I mean by non industrial wood, is using wood that's not clear cut or it's taken from an ecosystem in a way that is manageable, and that can mean different things depending on what kind of forest ecosystem you're talking about. Those particular photo is of a tree that's called Madrone, from California, that's kind of a special tree. It's anything but straight, but people have been learning how to use it, kinda pretending that it's straight in timber frames and other things. 
	Bamboo, and I'll talk more about this later, very interesting building material. It's actually a big grass, so it should be in the category with straw, which is also a grass, but of course it has its own properties, so it gets its own category. And stone. If you're lucky enough to have stone and you can use it in an area that's not prone to a lot of earthquakes, then of course it's a great natural building material. We were lucky enough to have some really cool stone for the project we've been working on. 
	All right, so, with those materials, you can make a whole list of different parts of the building and I'm going to run through those really quick. Cob, is the one that you're all familiar with at this point, or most of you. You mix clay and sand and straw with your feet. Some people get really into it. Really into it. Then you stack it up on a foundation, and you trim it, so that's me trimming right there. Some people really get into this too. That's one of my apprentices from a few years ago. Several years ago. And you can see, but the cool thing about that picture is you can see the lifts of cob drying and then the cob below that is dry cob. 
	Okay, so, what I'm doing in this section is talking about a material or a wall system, that can be made out of the basic ingredients of natural building, and then showing you an example of that. This is a cob house. This is the first permitted cob house in northern California in Willets. It was actually built by a single mother and her kids. And it's ... One thing about natural building is permitting it can be somewhat complicated. 
	Adobe, is probably a technique that you've heard of. Adobe is the practice of making ... It's exactly like cob, so you mix stuff up, you can see there we're mixing on the tarps. But you make blocks out of it and dry those in the sun and then those get stacked into a wall. That's mortared with clay, so actually you can see that better in that photo. 
	The little rocks in there ... This is adobe, this is adobe project in process in Mexico. They stick the rocks in there to get good plaster adhesion.
Audience :	Why would you use bricks as opposed to cob? What's the advantage or disadvantage?
Massey Burke:	That's a good question. The main advantage is that you can stash up a lot of blocks first. You can just sort of make blocks, make blocks, and then when you're ready to make a building, you can make a building really fast because they're all dry. Adobe, once the blocks are dry, goes way faster than cob. It kinda depends on your work force. Adobe, I use a lot when it's not a seismic issue and I have big volunteer groups because ... The other thing is, from that perspective, there's inherent quality control. You can tell if a block is not integrated but when you're integrating a cob wall, you can't necessarily see if there is a ... Like you kind of have to watch everything that's going on. 
	And so if you have a whole bunch of people making adobes then you can use blocks selectively and use ones that aren't as strong higher in the wall or whatever. Then the main disadvantage is that adobe is not nearly as strong seismically as cob. That's the main distinction.
	Okay, so, these guys are making adobes and letting them dry. And then you're I think probably familiar with adobe traditions in the southwest. And so they often look a good bit like this. That is actually a church in Taos. Straw bale construction, so obviously a lot less clay in this. You bail straw and you stack that into a wall and then you plaster it. You can plaster it with earth, which works really nicely, or you can plaster it with various other kinds of things. 
	Bails, as you can imagine, are the most vulnerable to water damage, so you really have to get them off the ground and put a big roof on them, but bale buildings ... This is a finished bale building. They tend to be more rectilinear, than other types of natural building, they're also getting pretty common in California. One of the reasons is that several years ago, they passed a ban on burning the rice straw in the central valley, and so there's all these rice straw that farmer's didn't know what to do with, and they all got behind this testing that's required for bale construction. And so it's a bit easier to permit a bale building, than other types of natural building in California. Also, because, if you think about it, it fits really nicely into the way we think about buildings. It's just these modular blocks that get put into a shape and so you don't have to change the way that you contract the labor all that much for straw bale.
Audience :	May I ask a question?
Massey Burke:	Yes.
Audience :	The external supports of those columns, they're serving to also support the roof across that whole structure?
Massey Burke:	Yes. When you do straw bale, I didn't mention this, but for any of these techniques, the ones I've shown so far, they can either be load bearing or non load bearing. So, adobe, cob, and straw bale have the capacity to hold up a roof. For bales, it depends on what kind of bales you get and it also depends on the climate. If you're in a really wet climate, probably you want to use them as infill, because it's easier if they really get wet it's easier to repair. But, in any case, what you're looking at there, I think this is a non load bearing straw bale, in which case there is wood in that plaster too and you're looking at the porch. This is also in northern California. 
	Another technique, called light straw clay. This is from Germany. Our name for it is a sort of awkward translation of [German 00:18:41], which is the German word for it. It's a non load bearing system, so you require some kind of a frame, which is usually woods. It can be big timbers or it can be more like stick framing. And this is a technique I'll return to in some of the projects I'll talk about. 
	It's basically a mix of mostly straw with a little bit of clay slip that's packed in between the vertical wooden structural members in the building for insulation and also for the surface to plaster. Here, you can see it, you can see the form is at the top, you just leap a form up the wall as you fill the wall in. This is a light straw house. Again, they tend to be rectilinear. This is deigned and built by a man named Robert La Porte, who specializes in timber frames and light straw houses.
	Let's see how these ... These next few images might be blurry but I pilfered a few. Not too bad. These are the interiors of his houses and I love to show these because they're ... He probably makes the most normal natural buildings. It gives people a good sense that, if you want to build this way, it doesn't mean it has to be this wavy, crazy thing. Any of the techniques I showed you can be finished like this.
	Yeah, so again, these are slightly low res, but you can see ... And he specializes in Japanese timber framing, so there's always this one curvaceous beam. There are like that, and everything else is totally straight. All these plasters by the way, are earthen plasters, which I'll talk about just a little bit, it's not the focus of this presentation, but the same materials, you put through a screen so you make them very fine and that is used on the wall as a plaster. It'll go about as fine as you have patience for, basically.
	All right. So now we're getting into a family of walls that are called wattles, which means woven walls. These interest me a lot, structurally because they're ridiculously strong, especially when you have clay reinforced straw weaving one direction, as is the case in this picture and stiff verticals going the other direction. This is called clay wattle. Somebody just made up the name because I don't know of any vernacular precedent for this. Like, a lot of techniques that I'm talking about, we got from old traditions, and I will talk about that. This one, kind of just got made up, because we didn't have the right material for a traditional wattle, which is the next technique I'll show you.
	But this, you make these ropes of clay and straw, and you weave them around the uprights, which are here. I think those are fir poles, just like saplings, but bamboo works really well. I've actually even seen people use wire. It acts as an armature for the weave and then once it dries, it's incredibly strong. It has a kind of strength that some of the other earthen walls don't have, and so without getting too far into it, this particular system needs to be structurally tested, so we know more about it.
	These are a couple of apprentices weaving a wall. You can see they're halfway up. That's the finished wall. In this case, so they did bottle art. Those are recycled bottles. And they also chose to keep a little bit of the texture that you get, so that's a plastered clay wattle wall.
	This is traditional wattle and daub without the daub, so the daub refers to the plaster. And this is split bamboo with small bamboo verticals, the vertical are whole bamboos and then you split it to run the other way. And this is often the infill that's used in those incredible Japanese farm houses, if you can imagine the farm house with the thatch and the roof line that does this. There's big timbers in the walls and they were often infilled with this technique and then earth plastered on both sides or lime plastered. 
	Here is some wattle I saw in India, and here is what it looks like plastered, so that's also a wattle and daub wall. And actually behind the guy who is standing there, that's a form of ... There is also compressed earth block in this building, which is similar to adobe but ... And I thought that's what behind them but it's not, it's another whole story. This is in western India.
	And it's interesting because this is not the traditional earthen construction, this is a reinvention of earthen building that's happening in this part of India. And there is also an old tradition of earthen building where they build this round houses called Bungas in this part of India. And so in other parts of this building they draw on those traditions. But obviously this is very modern. 
	And then this is just to illustrate the strength of woven bamboo, we were messing around making a woven bamboo dome, so that's entirely woven out of bamboo splits and these guys are jumping around on it. You can see it's just been held up by the weave. It's basically a monster basket, which is a valid way to make a building even a bigger one than this one.
	And then plasters, I was actually thinking this slide was later on, but this is here to talk about earth and plasters a little bit. You saw a few slides of earthen plasters when I was showing you the light straw buildings that Robert La porte builds. This is probably the most upscale project I've ever done. And I came here within my project section also. But this is a house in Napa this way upscale green house. And some of the plasters on the wall, I just did the plasters. The plasters on the wall are ... Some of them are cement reinforced earth and then the fire place there is red clay that I dug up in an area where I work and then refined it. 
	But it was really cool because as with almost any building project, at least in California, half of the framing crew was Mexican. And so I show up and I'm doing what they do in Mexico on this $7 million house in Napa, and they were just like, "What is this? What's happening? What are you doing?" And it was cool. And I'm going to speak to that latter, that's actually one of my sub-thesis points, what's happening when very wealthy Americans choose to use these techniques. It's really interesting. It's really interesting culture. It's very important culturally. And I was only fair [inaudible 00:24:36] with experiences and actually this is also a very rectilinear building and their cultural aesthetic in Mexico is very rectilinear and so I had to get the corners really square. 
	And actually one of the Mexican masons asked me out because he saw that my corner was so square. I'm like, wow, I think I'm complimented. Other examples of plasters, these are from Bill and [inaudible 00:24:58] who have been straw bale construction and art plastering for ever, and they just do cool stuff with earth plasters. That's a couple of different kinds of ... And that's a sculptured obviously earth and plaster. 
	More of their work in Builders without borders install, and actually the color in that is way hyped up, it's not quite so fluorescent, it's a bunch of natural colors. But it's different earth and lime plasters. What I love about their work is they really do a lot of revealing of the fiber, so you can see the sort of specs and stuff around the square, which is revealing the straw bale. They split their plasters back so the straw fiber shines through it and it gives just very beautiful ... and they do it like nobody else.
	And then this is something I was playing with, you can do [inaudible 00:25:40] plaster stuff on pretty much anything. And so that's lime plaster on a little sleeping nook in a remodel that I'm working on. 
Audience :	When you say lime plaster, distinguish that from the earth plasters?
Massey Burke:	It's just another kind of a binder. And so if you think of a ... Has anybody seen those ... Have you seen lath and plaster houses? That's the form you're most likely to find it in this country but it's basically limestone that's been burnt, and so it becomes reactive. And you mix that with sand and it hardens back up into limestone on your wall. And so a lot of the old lath and plaster building are lime plasters. So, lime, sand, and [horsehair 00:26:19]. It's a white plaster. I might save this for the question period but basically the plasters that you want to use on natural buildings are ones that are vapor permeable. You don't to use finishes that seal of a wall because the building can actually handle amount of water vapor, and even liquid water as long it can get out again. And so you have to design for that.
	And so earth plasters do that really well, lime plasters do it well, cement plasters do it very poorly, and there is a few others ... There is mixes you can make. But for finishes, you generally see earth based plasters or lime based plasters. And again, that's like a whole category of discussions, if people would like to ask about that at the end, I'm happy to talk about it. 
	This is an earthen floor, so it's basically a horizontal plaster but you seal it with Lindsey oil. Several coats of Lindsey oil and it becomes hard. If you travel in Mexico, you might see earthen floors sealed with ox blood or motor oil, which I've never done either of those things. But traditionally they're sealed with ox blood, so the protein basically becomes a glue, and they're totally beautiful. So, another thing you can do with these materials. 
	So, what have people been doing with these materials around the world for centuries? This is going to be a very brief jot through some of the vernacular building traditions. This is in Mali. And this is very emblematic of how they build. They have a very strong architectural language in Western Africa. And Mali in particular is famous for the style were you have this very strong linear elements, and actually this one is more linear than some of them. I  think this one is a newer one, but some of them are very ... This is curved [inaudible 00:28:06] and there are these vertical buildings, and I'll show you in the next slide, which is a famous. 
	This is an older one. This is the great mosque at Djenee, the Friday Mosque that has being in existent for several hundred years and it's probably the most famous example of it's type. And the wood that's sticking out, they re-plaster this every year. Not that you have to do that with natural building, it has more to do with the climate and how its build. In this case, the plaster is the only whether protection and so it needs to be re-plastered and earth plastered. But they build those wooden things into the walls, so you can climb up the building and re-plaster it every year. And they're also structural. 
	And so I'm told, and I'm not sure if this is just like natural building urban legend, that they divide the thing in half and race, the town does, so they actually do that? That's only hearsay but I've heard that a few times. 
Audience :	How old is that dome?
Massey Burke:	I don't remember the actually date, it's several hundred years old. And I think it was rebuilt at least once. I think there was a ... I don't know the history of this part of the world very well but at some point a hostile cultural force was in power in this area and they actually stopped at the gutters and let the rain destroy the mosque, and then it was rebuilt. And that was at least a couple of hundred years ago. Do you know? I don't know the exact dates but it's been around-
Audience :	The French rebuilt it in the 19th century, they did.
Massey Burke:	Yeah, and I think it might even been before ... So, it might have been rebuilt twice. But at least once it was massively rebuilt not just restored because this person, that I can't remember, intended to destroy it. And I guess you can't actually destroy a mosque, you can just sort of enhance the weathering process, and so that's what he did, he stopped at the gutters. 
	This is an amazing earthen building tradition in Ghana and Burkina Faso. I think this is specifically Burkina Faso, where they actually polish the whole house. So, if you work with clay, you know that you can burnish clay. And so you can put pressure on it at a certain water [inaudible 00:30:02] has a certain degree of water in it and put pressure in it and make it a polished surface. And so you can imagine doing that to a pot, put these guys do it to their entire buildings. And the color that you re seeing is is local pigments, and some of it I think is plant pigments. Most [inaudible 00:30:17] pigments from clays and then they add some sort of latexy plant additive to it to make it shinier and also a little bit more water proof. 
	But this again is the kind of tradition where it's renewed quite frequently. And I have a lot of pictures of this just because it's so cool. I think it's just ridiculously beautiful, very strong tradition. In many of these traditions, the women are the plasters, and sometimes they are the builders, which is pretty cool. 
	Okay, so [inaudible 00:30:44] minutes, I mentioned earlier that light straw clay is from Germany. This is considered one of the oldest houses in Germany in the sort of [inaudible 00:30:53] German term for timber framing is [German 00:30:56], and so it just means timber with stuff infilled. And that can be brick or it can be something ... They don't really so adobe. It can be wattle and daub or it can be light straw clay, which is that packed straw with a little bit of clay. So, that I showed you . 
	This I believe was built in 1289. And so it's quite old. And there are many of these houses, this is not an anomaly. And so many of the timber frames that have been infilled with earthen materials have been continuously inhabited for hundreds of years even in Europe. They are the well known traditions of this in England. This is where we get cob. This is not actually in Devon, I don't think, it might be. But Devon is the area of England where they have a subsoil that's kind of like cob ready mix. And so it's got nice proportions of sand and clay, and they just sort of mix it up and throw a little bit of straw on it and pile it on the wall. And so they have these walls that are four feet thick. 
	And again, some of these houses are then continuously inhabited for 600 years. And also note the really awesome thatching. So, northern European thatch traditions are really cool and they're highly skilled. It's only the natural building traditions that I have not had a chance to study yet, but it's taking reeds, usually they have a type like phragmites which you can find around here. It's actually a non-native species but common in this area. And it takes acres and acres to do one thatch. But if these thatches are made properly, they last 70 years. And then they just ... I think in some cases for renewing them they just add on top and in other cases they re-thatch the building. 
	These are usually lime plastered actually, going back to your line. The white wash buildings, actually this one looks like it's not plastered at all, it's just trimmed cob if I had to guess. 
	And then a couple of totally out there traditions, this is an entirely reed .... Speaking of reeds, this is a reed tea house in Iraq, near the Euphrates river. And they just bundled the reeds up and they made it into a building. And I think what really blows me away about this is how big it is [inaudible 00:33:01]. And then the construction. 
	So, Colombia is the birth place of really dramatic bamboo construction and the personality that sort of headed that up is this man named Simon Velez. Colombia has a lot of this type of bamboo called guadua in [inaudible 00:33:18] is known vernacularly as timber bamboo, and there are other species that are also in that category but it's huge, and the bamboo is this big sometimes. And so you can lots of things with it that we can't do with our timber bamboos like this. This is a bridge built by a man named [inaudible 00:33:35] and every single piece in that bridge is probably five or six inch diameter bamboo from that area. 
	What's interesting about this, and this is something I'm going to sort of touch upon more, bamboo is considered a poor person's building material, even Guadua is considered a poor person's building material in Colombia. And they do various things with it, they sort of flatten it out to make this plywood and a lot of the buildings before Simon Velez got into it were just kind of stick frame bamboo, just verticals and infilled with various things. And their word for like a wattle and daub is [foreign language 00:34:15] and so again just woven panels with mud on them. 
	And then Simon Velez was an architect. And so he came from a wealthy family in Colombia and said, I'm going to be the bamboo architect. And so he took bamboo and really explored what it could do and what it liked to do as a material. And his most building is the Zeri pavilion at the world fare that was in Germany. And it's this enormous [inaudible 00:34:45] all these angular rounds pavilion that might be the biggest bamboo structure in the world, I'm not sure. But it's not in this slideshow, but I highly recommend googling it, the Zeri pavilion if you're in the bamboo.
	Okay. That's a very quick jot through some of the world's vernacular building traditions or natural building traditions old and new. So, this is actually ... This is obviously newer construction but it's tapping into a very old vernacular tradition. 
	All right. I want to show you a few things that I've worked on. This is the interior of the house that I did my apprenticeship on. And so it's the first building I worked on, and you can see there is a lot of wood in it. It's in an area in Northern California where there is a lot of small devil's fir. And so they were actually removing them to keep about the right wood balance in the Oak woodlands because previously the Oak woodlands were burned, and that's difficult the do politically anymore. And so they removed the trees manually instead and they use them in building. 
	And so this is actually what's considered a hybrid natural house, and so the back wall is straw bale the wall that you're looking at is cob and then the loft upstairs is light straw clay. There is the outside. And again this is in northern California. This is the front of it. 
	This is a guest house that I built, or a guest cabin is probably more accurate. This is in a organic wall that [inaudible 00:36:11] in Northern California, and you have to remember this for the last section of my talk, which is about Lake county and the greater effects that natural building can have. This is kind of the beginning of some of that. But again, the bigger section is straw bale and the little round section is a sleeping nook and that's cob. Here is that view left over adobes and [inaudible 00:36:33]. One view of the inside, there you go, there is some lime plaster. So, it's just white plater and sand. And that's earthen floor, you can see a little bit of it. 
	This maybe my most whimsical building. This is an indoor, outdoor shower house for the intern village at the solar living institute in Heartlands. And it's really exploring the shapes that earth likes to take. I love arches, arches are cool structurally because they're entirely compressive structures meaning that the loads are transferred by pressing on the material, not by stretching the material. Earth is great in compression, and it's disastrously bad in tension unless you add something to it. So arches are awesome for earthen construction. 
	And also I had a situation where ... You've all experienced how much work it does to make cob, so this building didn't not to be entirely enclosed and so I wanted to make holes wherever possible, so I had to make all of that cob because it wasn't like a huge budget project or anything. This is part of the inside. And this was built in great part with the interns who stay at this site when they're interning there. That's the upper shower, with all sorts crazy stuff in it. You can see the curvature of the indoor shower, which is actually a dome, it's an earth back dome. And that's part of the interior, again with arches. I like that just because it shows off again how much freedom we have with the materials, we kind of bring out and make kind of ledges or whatever. 
	Again, you saw this. That was probably the most whimsical building, this is probably the most upscale straight laced building I've ever worked on. Earth plaster in very expensive in Napa. 
Audience :	[crosstalk 00:38:20] is that mica or what, it's like a glass?
Massey Burke:	It's just a regular. That was a masonry fire place that was put, it's fire, temporary glass. Again I was responsible for the finishes only in this particular picture. This was a fun project. This was a natural building install, is part of a big green expo that took place in Washington DC. It started I think the year before Obama's inauguration. And so we built this arch and also little straw bale building on the terrace of the US botanic gardens, and as you can see the capital is across the street. And we were doing what we were doing. We had been doing here mixing cob with our building sort of right there and the congressmen and senators were walking by on the street behind the arch and sort of, "What are you doing?" And getting interested. It was cool. 
	And it was a temporary install as part of this expo, but they decide to leave it so that it can be up for Obama's inauguration. And then it was taken down. But I think in terms of proportions I'm just fond of this project. I'm realizing ... Just so you know, that's elongated. The arch looks really tall and skinny, it's actually it's been distorted by the projector. It's a Roman arch. 
	This is a series of public works projects country that I've been doing in Lake county. Lake county is an area north of San Francisco that doesn't have much of an economy, and also has a pretty disastrously bad housing stock. And so I'll just go through the work itself and then I'm going to back and talk about the other implications of that trajectory. 
	The first project was in Lucerne creek park. And I love this picture because they let me put adobe on top of the sign. That sign was there before the project, and we were like, how are we going to tie in a bunch of curvy natural building to this concrete sign. And I asked if I could put [inaudible 00:40:22] on top of the sign, and they said, well, yeah, I guess so. [inaudible 00:40:26]. There is the rest of the install, it's what I call a city wall. This was cool. 
	A colleague of mine ran for county supervisor in Lake county with the intention of introducing more ecological practices up there. And talked everybody into instead of what they usually do in this situation is just put a bunch of boulders. Some people drive on to this area and park on it. And she said, " Well, can we do this community building thing instead?" And everybody said, "Okay." The city said, "Okay, $5,000 do something." And so I said, "Well, we can make a city wall and maybe a few other things." And I really had no idea who was going to turn up, and 60 people ended up showing up to help me over the course of two weeks. And this is in a community where most people are older, a lot pf people are disabled, there is all sorts of meth problems, so it was pretty interesting.
	So, it's just an adobe, it's a cob wall actually. The base of it is starch recycled concrete and the top is recycled redwood, so that's our roof cap in that case. And then we did end up building, well, arched bench at the back. And this was what came out of that project. So, down the road in another part of Lake county there is a man made island that's been acquired by the county it's called Clark's island. And it got zoned as an eco park but nobody really knew what that was. And so the community that's the host of this town has decided to define that for themselves. And so they've decided that part of that was natural building. And so we made a very up adobe sign to begin with, here it is again. It's kind of fun, it's right by a gas station [inaudible 00:42:08]. 
	One of the reasons that it's really fun to build in Lake county is that they have gorgeous building clays, beautiful reds stuff. This is an arched roof sitting area, so it's kind of a long bench with a corner to it. And it's not purple. This is again something that the projector is doing, it's brown clay down here and the red clay is not quite that red. And here is another picture of it. And behind it you can see that the bridge is heading over to the island. One more view of that. 
	And that led to ... I've been finishing up details on those little things and then we're in the design process for the Pagoda, which is going to be the centerpiece of islands, which will be the biggest thing I've ever built, and it's scheduled to be build next year, next building season. This was a conceptual sketch for it, it's another whimsical building, it's a spiral building, it needs to be mostly open, so security can see through the building at night because there are a lot of vagrants and all sorts of people who just like to trash things. Unfortunately, I know they do. There is a population up there that is hard to know how to relate to them. 
	In any case, the people who are in charge of the park requested that if we build the building there, they just need to be able to see what's happening in it. So, there are a lot of arches, and actually there are more ... Everybody liked this little sketch, but there are more arches in this than you can accomplish structurally with earth, and so the inner section is going to be bamboo reinforced earth. I'm currently working on the design and engineering of this building, the scale of that is about 30 feet. 
	And so I'm currently working on the engineering of this with two different architecture and engineering programs in the Bay area, and it's fun because there is no precedent for figuring out how this works structurally as far as I know. I mean, there are things that are kind of similar but ... And I don't have the drawing because we're experimenting with different layouts and what's actually going to stabilize that center ring with all the arches in it and stuff. 
	This are some of the student renderings I've been getting early this semester with different things you could do. Our engineer says we need these two ... So, the building, everybody liked the idea of a spiral, and then the engineer said, "Oh, you got to have these arms that come off, to stabilize that center part." And so we're playing around spatially with what we do with those. The students are playing around with that. Those are a couple of our ideas. 
	And then again this is the bamboo that we have there to work this. This is pretty big. We were harvesting from this grove to test the bamboo that we'll use in the construction of the Pagoda. We need to get structural numbers for the actual bamboo fiber, so it came from this nursery. This is one of the species. And this species actually, by the way for people who are working with me is the same as the stuff that we cut. But this gets to about five inches in the Bay area. It's called Japanese timber bamboo, but it's more so the same as the stuff down by the train station. 
	And then my other current project is my house, and it's a natural building remodel mostly. And we've been working on the secondary unit, that what it looked like. I live in a house that we call villa Sobrante, and it's actually two buildings and a bunch of space in the backyard that I bought with three of my good friends three years ago. And it's in the Bay area, it's close to Berkeley. And the intention is to bring natural building into the urban context. We have a lot of urban spaces, we have a lot of urban buildings that need to be improved in some way. And a lot of people assume that natural building is not really relevant in urban areas. And there were definitely challenges for sure, but we thought, well, we kind of think somebody just needs to do it. 
	The buildings on this property are these two little funky stick frame, stacked old, kind of basic California houses, nothing special. And also as far as we knew there had never been a permit issue for this in this county and our intention was to set a permit precedent. So, if we set a precedent with a building technique then it makes it easier for someone else to come along and do the same thing at the county level or someone at the city level. 
	We decided we wanted to use light stray clay to remodel this building, which is the clay straw thing I showed you. This is what it looked like before, and we had to pour the foundation. This is blurry picture but you can see now the straw is in between the studs there inside. So it's half done. Here is Karen plastering the ceiling. We put foam actually in the ceiling and then plastered directly under the foam. And this is where we are at right now with it. There is a little trim that needs to go in and finish plaster on the walls, but it's pretty close and the ceiling is my favorite part. I think you can see a little bit, it's kind of a bolted ceiling. 
	And we also are building small buildings in the backyard. And what's nice is that if you build smaller than 120 square feet you don't need a permit, and so these are my learning buildings. And so if there is something that's being kicking around in my head, I build a little building. And this is one is mostly, it's a form of [inaudible 00:47:28] earth and cob and some other things. We got some recycled big bamboo, and those are the rafters for the roof. I think you can see it at different stages. The bags there actually they contain ... That's a type of building called earth bag construction, which is like [inaudible 00:47:43] and I haven't told you about it but it's another form of natural building. 
	Again in progress, and there we go. That's the finished building. And the details is hard to see but the mesh around the lower roof is actually a living roof edge. And the windows are recycled. And this is my building, it's in progress. This is one of the other little buildings. It's a woven bamboo earthen vault. And I'm working on the roof structure in this picture. And so it has a lifted curvy roofs and their a couple of different roof sections. And the hole that you see in that window is going to become a pair of opening doors. And a few other components. There is a detail of the bamboo roof construction. And that actually is a setup for a sealed lime plaster, so the water proofing would be lime plaster and some tile probably. 
	And this is one of trances for a long extended roof of the side of the building. And a lot of what I've gotten interested in is the structural use of small bamboo because there is small bamboo all over the world, often it's not considered a building material. It's usually present in this disaster areas. And so if you begin to test it structurally then that has international implications. And so I've showed you the picture of the grove that we took our testing bamboo from a few slides back, and we're doing that with an eye to being able to develop construction protocols for smaller bamboos as well as timber bamboo. 
	Okay. Going through those slides took longer than I thought, and i think I don't have ... I know I can run over a little bit but probably not a huge amount. 
Speaker 1:	I don't know how many more slides you have but we wanted to just have time for questions.
Massey Burke:	Time for questions, okay. I'm going to through this pretty quick I think, but I think the why is important. So, why for me ... Well, okay, generally why do we bother with buildings ecologically? And I think you probably all know this, but here is a good rundown. 
	The way that we create and inhabit buildings in this country is fairly high impact at this point. And the way that you can deal with that, there is many different good tools for dealing with that, natural building is definitely one of them. I think high-tech buildings are also one of them, and then it just depends on how you combine those two things. But whatever tools you use, these are some of the problems we need to deal with when we look at our building environment.
	But for me, personally I started doing natural building because for a lot of reasons but one of them was because I need ... I studied humanities, I need beauty in my life, but I need beauty that's not coming at the cost of somebody else, somebody else having beauty. And so I just got really interested in what can you do with what you have and you can more or less see the impact that makes. And a point that I like to make on the building side, but I don't know if I have done that, is that if you do the mixing yourself and the building yourself of cob, you're personally experiencing the embodied energy in that building. That's all the energy that takes to make a building except that when we do stick framing or other kinds of industrial construction, you just don't experience that. You don't have any reference for what it takes the refine a material and turn it into a human space. And so natural building kind of let's you do that. 
	I would say starting with natural building was kind of a personal investigation into how do you live well comfortably because I also feel like so much of sustainability is intergranular. And do less of this, and do less of that. And it's a lot of don'ts, and it can be really difficult to see where creativity can be engaged. And so I needed a tool that was about being creative, about adding something positive, not just subtracting a negative behavior. And so natural building it's a helpful tool to think about that with at least. And I think in some ways it is a way to create human space where you do have some idea of the impact.
	But I'm going to tell two stories that are why I think natural is so relevant to our culture. And the first story has to do with this technique that I learned in India. This is a decorative earth plaster technique that's called Lepan it's just a [inaudible 00:52:10] stuff. This is a wall from my house in El Sobrante, and they screen clay and horse manure to make the mix, it's very simple. And they are very particular about this. It's from Gujarat's in a region called Kutch. And they mostly decorate inside with this technique. 
	I went to India because my parents decide they wanted to go, and so I said, well okay, I'll go visit. And we went to this part of India first just because I knew vaguely that there was earthen building going on there. And I didn't know anything about India when I went, and it's huge. And so this was a bit random but I was there with a good friend of mine and we said, Okay, we're going to go find this earthen building tradition in Gujarat. And these are three members of the Rabali tribe, and they're semi-nomadic, they're the cattle herders of western India, and because the way things work in India is that your guest house owner, you say, well, I kind of want to do this, and then they pull all these strings and ... We tried to control this process for a long time, it doesn't work. 
	And then they just kind of say, okay, get in this car and then you're going to go out into the desert and then there will be someone who will show you how to do this. You're like, "Okay." And so we did and we end up at this tint with these women who were dressed like this, and this is just totally gratuitous picture of cute Indian children. But they're standing [inaudible 00:53:34] wall, there you go, there is an adobe wall behind them. Incredibly adorable. But this is Parma, and she's here standing in front of some of her decorative work. And she taught us how to do this. This is not Parma, this is someone else, but she's beginning a mud work decorative form, and they improvise it completely. They just start and begin to infill with this sculptural plaster. 
	And these people live with very, very little. I mean, they have these incredible clothes and they come from a craft region of India that's famous within India and also outside of India. But they live in tents on the ground. And so we got to sit there and Parma taught us very strictly how to mix these stuff and how to sculpt with it, and what you can't see in this photo is that there is this ring of Indian men and women just watching what's happening where there is a strange Western woman who's in the mud with the ... What's so interesting about knowing natural building is no matter where you are, somebody is surprised. And it's true when you're building on the capital lawn, and it's true when you're doing earthen building in India where it's native because they don't have a lot of Westerners come through and want to just get into what they're doing. 
	And so the very act of taking interest in a traditional culture as a western at this point is very significant because they're losing faith and interest in their own traditions right about the time that we're discovering that we're going to need them. And obviously we're not going to starve if we don't know how to do Lepan but it was a very accessible technique, it was easy to latch onto, I could learn it in two hours. She could teach me with no English and then the whole village sort of watched this, had this sort of exchange of information happen, exchange of cultural information. 
	I made some other friends in that part of India and they happened to come visit us the next summer. So, here we're having [inaudible 00:55:26] what seems to be happening except in my backyard. This is Romu who is a [inaudible 00:55:31] maker but also from this part of India and one of my good friend Bob [Tyse 00:55:36] who's an architect. And I didn't know it but he'd been wanting to learn this technique for like 20 years. And so I sent out a random email saying, hey, we have these friends form India, we're going to do this technique on our wall, anybody is welcome. And I got an email from Bob saying, I'll be there in 10 minutes. 
	I want to go through this quick because it's just the process of the wall being made, so there is Romu again, Romu was my age, he'd never left his village in India, and he handled showing up in a house full of four single women fairly well coming from a traditional culture. But [inaudible 00:56:11] is my friend who is with him and is not in this photo, and he spoke English, but I never if I was getting straight translations or not, so I have no idea what Romu thought about this, but he certainly led us through this process. There is Bob learning. 
	And also what I love about this is the context, it's just like totally straight up motorboats, stick frame houses. Even when Romu wasn't doing this, he was so tired of American food that he would just cook curry and sit on our floor and eat it. He was either doing this or eating curry. This is one of my apprentices from a couple of years ago. There is [inaudible 00:56:43], so he's the translator. There he is again. And we were getting what we call ... Well, people would drive by and just screech to a halt and backup and look at this wall because it was so incongruous. So, the neighbor showed up and just sort of started asking about it. But I can't remember where these guys came from. A bunch of kids showed up ... I mean, I think it was organized but they didn't just wonder in.
	And then I love these. These are context pictures, so we were finishing the wall and this is the environment that it's set in. And that is the front of our house. What I find so valuable about this is that there is so few things that are really two way street between cultures that are not yet industrialized and cultures that are industrialized. And I know that's a dichotomy that's oversimplifying but it's so rare that both ways have something to really offer each other. 
	And so again and again I've had these experiences in natural building where there is this honest conversation going on that both sides know that they have a lot to benefit from the other culture. And this particular exchange of Lepans just one little iota of that because in the industrialized world we're learning that technology can be a big mess, not necessarily but often is, and there is a lot to be said for traditional ways of doing things and they can be combined with very sophisticated understanding of materials and update and everything else. But the people who have been practicing them for thousands of years are where we're getting the ideas in the first place. 
	And the people who have been practicing them for thousands of years often are losing their traditions for various reasons. And so when they watch ... Like I said, when they watch wealthy Americans get truly interested in what they do, then it often has a reversal effect on that cultural erosion in their own in where they live.
	So, that is story number one. Story number two is the story of lake county. So, Denise, my colleague became a county supervisor in a fairly conservative county and decided she was going to run on an ecological design platform, and got elected. And then she had taken a class from me right before that, and so she was familiar with natural building and asked me to build that guest house that I told to remember in [inaudible 00:59:03]. She moved to Lake county, bought an organic [inaudible 00:59:06] and got elected county supervisor. And so as you might imagine, she's a little bit remarkable, she's 50 I think. 
	And so she got this off the grounds, very small public works project just to show people that natural building is possible. And like I said, there is this whole swarth of incredible red clay covering Lake county. And so they had these abundant building material all around them but of course no tradition to use it. Project one was just get the idea out there that it's not going to melt. So the conversations I had during project one are, don't you know that you can't build adobe in this climate. And then I explain why I think it will be all right. And now it's been a few winters and so people are comfortable with it. I think this is out of order again. 
	This is project two, so that led to all right, what can we do with Clark's island, so what building can we put in Clark's island? And so then people think about, oh Pagoda or some full on building that we might engineer. When you engineer, you sent a precedence, and then you begin to think about what goes around the building, interesting. So, we have this blank slate of an island and we're going to put a cool building in it but then what? And then people start thinking about well, we kind of have water quality issues to deal with and then there is going to be some runoff and then how is all these sort of tied together. 
	Again, you can see this is Clark's Island the parks, not much on it, some fig trees, so it's surrounded binary of Lake county that's called the Keys, so it's a bunch of canals with houses in and around the canals. Another view, so you can see down one of the canals. And a rickety old bridge that used to be trailer park on the island, and they took it off and the bridge really shouldn't support vehicle traffic, but they were driving on it and so it's been converted to a pedestrian bridge. But that's as far as they got. And then we did some of the natural building. 
	The natural building ... So, I built the sign for Clark's Island. The natural building served to bring together a community design group. The cool thing about natural building especially when people aren't expecting it is that it's kind of the embodiment of creative ecological design on a bigger scale. If you imagine that you might collaborate creatively with an ecosystem, there is all sorts of ways you can do that, and you're probably familiar with some of them. You can create a wetland that's also a great water system. You can create ecosystems that help balance out human life and bring us more comfort, but also serve as life support for many other living things. And so we're learning how to do that. 
	Natural building has this incredible centralizing force. It's sort of like it's like a living system in away because you're using biodegradable materials, and there are local materials, but you get instant gratification. If you make a wetland for treating your gray water, you don't get instant gratification, it takes several years and you have to tweak it for a while. But natural building is just sort of ... You have to just do it. And so it's kind of the quickest direct experience people can have of beginning that creative relationship with ecosystem. And so you can strategize for that. You can plan for it because it's fairly dependable that dynamic.
	And so you can start to see people centralize around the project and realize that a community ... And the other piece of it is that you people are just empowered. I mean, you an dig stuff out of the ground and make a building out of it. And so people think well, now we can start somewhere. They start with building usually and then they begin to talk about the context, and what else can we do, and what problems are we considering. And if you leverage that, then you can begin to feed that conversation. And Denise and I decided that we want to try to do that just to see if it would work in Lake county, this place that has no money, has a big Lake that's got nutrient loading and [inaudible 01:03:01] and runoffs and heavy metals and everything else in it. 
	So, then we did it at the bench, which engaged I think a few hundred people from the community. And then we proposed the pagoda, and that drew in the university program, and so that kind of legitimized natural building for Lake county like, oh people outside of Lake county would be interested in this. And then the community group started to think, well, we need a Master plan, so how do we ecologically design the whole island? And out of that came various wetland ideas and trying to figure out how the island can relate to the lake because the lake levels go up and down a lot. And also how do we use ... So their [inaudible 01:03:43] rights, we can use water from a lake to irrigate this island. But what if we create a landscape that returns the water to the lake cleaner than we took it out, so there is an idea. And this are sketches from the community group that came together after they had the experience of natural building to start to think about these other stuff. 
	And so a few sketches trying to relate how the Pagoda relates to things. And the first physical embodiment of that investigation into the greater ecology will be my last slide. This is a floating island and I consider it to be a very good example of [inaudible 01:04:23] a floating island is a recycled mat of plastic that imitates this phenomenon that happens in [inaudible 01:04:31] where the [inaudible 01:04:32] delaminate from the bottom of the lake, floats up to the surface and vegetates itself. 
	And the microbial community that lives in that mat of pit, removes nutrients from the water at an incredibly high rate. And so it keeps the water clean and oxygenated and does various other things for the water ecosystem. And then the plants on top create a habitat. And so you have this incredibly diverse productive little unit of a system that occurs naturally and can be mimicked. 
	And I don't necessarily know if I agree with mats of plastics being set afloat in bodies of water, I think there is arguments for and against that. But just the romance of the idea of a floating island or a floating garden caught everybody in Lake county all sides of the political spectrum. It's just this cool people just like plants, living things, living systems. And creativity around living systems. And so Clark's Island now has two installations of floating islands planted with native plants just to see if we can try to monitor how much nutrient they remove and what other things might be happening in the water column. It's just this first step towards a two way street between human and non human systems and how we might begin to participate regeneratively not just destructively. 
	And I love this photo for that because it's sort of this pathway leading out into the lake, and you don't really know where you're going to end up. Thank you for coming, any questions.
Audience :	When you are building one of these arches about 10 feet high made of cob, how do you keep it from collapsing as you're building it?
Massey Burke:	If you can, you built it really slowly. You built it really slowly, so you want it to dry as you go. 
Audience :	[crosstalk 01:06:25] dries as you build it?
Massey Burke:	That's ideally. What you do, you also use a form usually. You don't have to but it's way quicker to use a form, and you just leave the form in there until it's dry. There are some really cool traditions that don't use forms, like they may not have enough forms and they have these other ways of doing it. But I usually do it one of those two ways. Other questions? Yes.
Audience :	I don't have a question about the social contracts production that you mentioned, and there are two things that you said that to me were really prerogative, one was, you just briefly mentioned that form is very expensive and [inaudible 01:07:09] who commissioned the house in Napa and how the workers were Mexican. So, that's the one story, and the other story that you shared represent India [inaudible 01:07:23] I'm curious about what mean there being equal change and assymetry and needs and [inaudible 01:07:34]?
Massey Burke:	It's a good question and I should that by saying that it's my personal experience and I seem to observe that happening to some degree but maybe more I see the intellectual recognition of it in some people that I have worked with, so then I see the possibility of that. And so probably the best way I can describe it is just that both ... Okay, to take the example of the house in Napa. These guys who've moved up from Mexico, and they've lived in Napa for quite a while, and they're doing fine, but they're working on the carpentry of this big mansion. And they see that techniques that are used from their home towns that they remember are being used in this building. That these people who could have bought anything in the world decided they wanted to use that as the center piece of the house. 
	And what I have perceived several times is that ... I've talked to a lot of Mexicans both here and in Mexico who say, "Oh, my building is no good, we should build with concrete." And obviously it's not our place to tell them, "No, you should be building with mud." But you talk with others of them and they have a strange relationship to a lot of industrial building practices that have come into Mexico. The thing about concrete is that it doesn't really fit in most economies, it's very expensive, it produces enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, and it's introduced into places with very good intentions to create housing that's considered superior to the locally built housing. And in some ways it is, but it introduces this technique that is then for creation of housing in that area you suddenly begin to have this dependence upon somebody who's going to show up with the next load of concrete blocks. And in some places that can be manufactured locally and some places not. 
	But there is a cultural imbalance. They perceive that anything coming from an industrialized country must be superior or there is also ... It's a overgeneralization but you see it a lot when you travel and work people in places like Mexico or India. And so when they see us using and taking interest in their technique they ... It's probably not a politically correct thing to say, but it re-legitimizes it for them because we do have this economic imbalance. I've experienced it. After Romu who was just working with his traditional technique at our house, I heard from [inaudible 01:10:30] after he went home and Romu had said, "I think I'm going to decorate our kitchen with Lepan." Because they've kind of lost faith. 
	And so I kind of feel like our true interest in the skills they've cultivated for 10,000 years is what we have to bring to them, and what they have to bring to us is the fact they have cultivated these skills for 10,000 years. But it's just our attention that actually tips the scale sometimes. That's not a generalization I can make. I'm speaking very subjectively and it's just something that I've experienced when I have worked with builders in other parts of the world. I don't know if I'm answering your question or not?
Audience :	[inaudible 01:11:14] just curious about ... I guess the other side of it is are they getting paid well building in this way, or is it just like an aesthetic thing?
Massey Burke:	I mean, that question, at least my experience in California is that they're all over the map in terms of how much they get paid. In this particular case they were very skilled and I think they were getting paid well, on a par with carpenters. Obviously, other Mexican workers are not paid that way. I don't necessarily see  that that's related to these techniques now. I had more to do with like a cultural exchange, where we are going to get the ideas that at least I think are going to help us forward. Cultures that because they haven't had anything except for what's around them have been extraordinarily creative with what's around them, so that's what I see. Other questions?
Audience :	I'm sorry, can you talk a little bit about [inaudible 01:12:12]?
Massey Burke:	Oh, though I feel maybe some of the builders should do that. I'll start, and if anybody wants to jump in please do. This is a fun project for me because I don't often get to practice natural building as an artistic medium. And so it is an artistic installation that is representing cob both as a practical material and as a beautiful material. And it's in conjunction with Sid's class, which is called the container's architecture. And so her students spent the first half of the semester designing the wall and making models of the wall, and now we're building it. And they'll spend a little bit of the second half completing the decorations on that wall, there will be some plaster embellishments on the wall. 
	It's an exploration of clay both as a beautiful material and as a structural material. And I would like people who have being building with me to add to that if you would like to or people from the art department who have been working with me or supporting this project.
Speaker 1:	Well, I think that you've done a really good job in describing the intent of it. As the instructor put in class, the most important thing for me is that the students understand that the breadth of usage from clay, the container as architecture implies we're looking at container but also the idea of the container in a broader sense and clay in a broader sense to actually think about the architectural associations given to an object such as a cob or a picture and then how you can take those same associations outside into an actual object and use that same material in creating an object that really engages the environment. 
	And it really takes on the space around it. I think what you're seeing out there now really shows how this object is having a conversation with the science center, with [Bearsley 01:14:10] made because of its scale, because of the textures, just because of the references that are beginning to appear in the form. It's just taking that idea of architecture within a small object and expanding it and taking it into the environment and seeing clay having that breadth of usage. 
Massey Burke:	And actually I don't want to add to that. And I'm sitting here thinking, I think a piece I didn't really emphasis well and is definitely a piece of this project is the community building aspect. And it was a piece that I kind of left out of my summary of the Lake county project ... Or I kind of just touched on it because my talk is going so long. But people just came and joined. And that is the other magic of natural building is that it's kind of inviting. I mean, obviously you get very dirty but it's not daunting. And there aren't big things with moving parts that are going to cut your fingers off. You just start doing it. And you can put a very small amount of mud on the wall or a very large amount. And so there is a very low barrier to entry but it can be as sophisticated as you make it. 
Speaker 1:	And it's pretty [inaudible 01:15:12] with the range of students that have to the project from engineers to biologists to just people in the humanities and across the division who are interested in doing this because the class has basically six people because of the size of the room and what we're trying to do. But the engagement has been broad. I mean, they are at least 40 students that have signed up to work on it during the two weeks that we're working on. And besides the faculty members who have shown up and the staff members and Paul [inaudible 01:15:49], I have photos of him working it out at the play. Jeff [inaudible 01:15:53] and a number of people who haven't come to the art department who wouldn't be thinking architecture in a way that we're thinking about it and certainly in the process that we're using. And so it really has been at it's simplest manifestation a real community building. 
Audience :	And the other people who are working on the building are those like the class of [inaudible 01:16:15] people who just walk by and ask questions about it. And that you see this building [inaudible 01:16:22] but it's the feasible thing, the feasible method, you can watch grow and have a lot of interest and have a lot of questions. And then I personally have been along with my engineering friends who've been asking me how it works, the lifetime of these buildings. And so having that structure being build on a college campus at an intersection of all these curves, that's means you are exposing so many people to this really interesting looking style of building, and so many people are learning and learning to appreciate that. 
Massey Burke:	That's certainly the fun of it for me, it's very cool. 
Speaker 3:	I mean, just because it just even of itself, all of the issues that need touched on from the society issues, the economic issues, just all of those things are sources of conversation that are dealt within the classroom across the divisions and all the different disciplines. And this object seems to be a focus point or at least a starting point for a lot of those questions and lot of those conversations. It is at the intersection of those question.
Audience :	How do you articulate the philosophy [inaudible 01:17:30] 
Massey Burke:	It's a good question. Yeah, that's a good question because it really depends on who ask because what I described to you is why I do it and what I see is it's potential. So maybe all I can do is try to articulate my philosophy. And probably you're getting that message because I like building small buildings. So again, I haven't chosen to become a contractor who cranks out 2000 square feet building or whatever. Small buildings interest me because you can learn as much on a small building as you can on a big one especially culturally. And no matter what kind of building you make, it's still going to have an impact. So, if you're practicing ecological building, big buildings that you need to make. And that's also why I got interested in ecological remodeling. 
	We have a lot of building ... It's like there are places in this country where housing stock is a challenge but overall we have enough buildings for the most part. But a lot of them are not necessarily built well or insulated well. So, I'd so my personal philosophy is just looking for the right use of this tool given what I see happening in the culture, and the intersection of that, well, just my personality, which is liking to make things that I can take for a [inaudible 01:18:44] if I want to.
	As far as an overall philosophy goes, I'd say most people share an interest in localization, so using what's local but also having a local culture. And of course there are some impacts in just transport of building materials. And so if you localize them, then that's minimized. And also if you're using local materials you might be refining them less, and so that minimizes impact and then you're designing for your climate. 
	One thing I didn't touch on but really interests me in natural building is that the different styles that I showed you are complimentary thermally, and so it's impossible to make very efficient buildings with natural construction. And so that's a whole another realm. 
	To summarize the philosophy, I mean, I'd say more it's just a really interesting technique coming into our culture at this time. And I don't know if I can sum up the philosophy, but maybe that's a summary of my philosophy. And because I see it as this way to open people to apply ecological design, which I think is really important. I mean, building is great without a context, without an ecological context the building is only get you so far.