in a small, suburban community outside of Oakland in northern California, the whir of a cement mixer emanates from the backyard. It’s a subdued, gentle churn, not even loud enough to overpower a neighbor’s rooster, who has proudly announced his presence.

At the front of the property, just off the street, sits a mound of dark gray clay gifted by another neighbor who excavated it to make way for a concrete driveway. Past the mound of clay and a couple of experimental earthen walls is an unassuming 1940s home that almost seems like a facade for what exists just beyond it: a wunderkammer of small natural buildings intermingled with a lush, verdant garden spread across a quarter-acre property.

The residence belongs to Massey Burke, a natural materials design-build consultant, director of the California Straw Building Association (CASBA), and co-founder of Verdant Building Products.

Dressed in a CASBA t-shirt, workwear pants, and her signature red clogs, dangly earrings and hair in a bun, Massey emerges from behind a tool closet she constructed out of cob. She was tending to the straw, clay, sand and water commingling in the cement mixer. Approving of the consistency, she was on to her next order of business: caffeine.

She’d need it for the ambitious schedule she has ahead of her. The next two days were earmarked for converting an old shed into a home office using five different natural building systems. Massey inherited the wood-frame structure when she purchased the property, and to her, it provided the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how natural building can integrate with conventional building to add aesthetic appeal and performance.

Thus, the goal was twofold: document the process to inspire others to learn more about the materials and techniques, and create a more professional backdrop for the increasing number of virtual meetings that have been cropping up on her schedule lately.

Besides the practical outcomes, for Massey, keeping her hands in the materials––particularly clay––is equally important. It keeps her sharp, but it also feeds her soul.

Relearning dying traditions

Massey came up in natural building more than two decades ago, before any kind of industry had formed around it.

“Still, we're at the very beginning of developing a bio-based building industry, but there was literally nothing except the people who were DIY, hands-on, and very few contractors who were practicing these building techniques,” she said.

As Massey puts it, she learned at the end of a dirt road with no power tools. Every project was quite literally from the ground up using raw materials.

She spent the next 10 years doing hands-on work and teaching others the techniques of these 12,000-year-old earthen building methods. Teaching connected her to a growing community of architects and builders who were starting to become interested in earthen building. It also brought her closer to the deeper impacts these materials had on people.

That’s when Massey became motivated to spread the values and practices of natural building beyond “the dirt road context and into the urban fabric.”

“I started to realize how much work still needed to happen to be able to scale these techniques into a wider context,” she said.

Rediscovering roots

Building shelter is innate and instinctive to humans and animals. Nomadic people from the Paleolithic and Mesolithic era engineered adaptable shelters from bones, hides, wood and earth, or used natural caves. More permanent shelters became more common during the Neolithic Revolution, when humans began to domesticate, shifting away from the nomadic hunter-gatherer life to settled agricultural societies. Some remnants of clay-based dwellings actually predate the Neolithic Revolution by about 1,000 to 2,000 years and are linked to the Natufian society, which set up semi-permanent lifestyles in modern-day Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon.

Sun-dried bricks date back to 7,000 BCE. The oldest were discovered in southern Turkey at the site of an ancient settlement near Jericho. In fact, adobe is widely recognized as one of the oldest and most enduring building materials in human history. Four simple ingredients––clay, sand, water and an organic binder like straw or grass––have been deemed by countless societies throughout history as one of the most effective building materials. It can flex under changing temperatures and keep interior environments temperate––a performance feature that seems to be somewhat of an elusive outcome for even some of the most innovative modern-day materials and systems.

“I love to talk about natural and bio-based building as the cutting edge of a 10,000-year-old tradition because it's built upon these very old ways of making housing,” Massey said. “But, as living traditions always do, they need updating and we do need them to perform as well as industrial materials as much as possible for people to really be able to adopt them.”

Of course, Massey recognizes that much has changed from the Neolithic Revolution days, and that perhaps some of the materials and methods need to adapt to meet new needs. But she also sees these time-tested materials as the path forward––a poly-solution to the current interconnected web of planetary challenges.

“Every time we go through another bit of breakdown in systems that we thought were normal, you see more and more why these older, more traditional building systems are really resilient and have a lot of values that can be hidden when everything is industrialized,” she said. “And that doesn't mean we can't industrialize earthen building to a greater degree. There's a lot of room to grow there that we just haven't really tackled because the values weren't there.

“I really feel like we've kind of forgotten what buildings are for in a lot of ways. There's so much more to them than just being comfortable and pretty and a good investment.”

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Scaling Natural Building as... Oct 15 · piper: decoding healthy... 33:46   ​

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Interesting bits...

• Societies throughout the world adapted their own methods for constructing adobe blocks based on the materials at hand. For instance, the O'odham used soil, sand, water, grass, ocotillo and/or mesquite.
• For a fascinating and in-depth read about the excavation work at the Taş Tepeler site in Turkey and how the Neolithic society evolved, check out this article in Archeology Magazine.

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