In this country, closely connected with these deficiencies and looming ominously over them all, is, as we have said, our house-famine.
To relieve the last in face of the others, and without further aggravating them, is one of the most grave and pressing of the many problems that confront us.
Briefly the problem is this: To provide a maximum of new housing with a minimum expenditure of labour, money, transport, and manufactured materials.
Broadly speaking, so far as rural housing is concerned, the solution must be sought through the use of natural materials already existing on the site, materials that can be worked straight into the fabric of the building, without any elaborate or costly conversion, and that by local labour.
“Pisé de Terre,” “Chalk Compost,” and “Cob” are three alternative forms of construction, one of which will usually fulfil the above conditions in any given situation.
Despite the somewhat outlandish and high-sounding name of the first, it is nothing more than a very old and very simple method of building, recently revived through stress of circumstances. The rude technique has happily been kept alive and preserved for us in out-of-the-way corners of the Continent and in our Colonies. Wherever there is a sufficiency of sunshine to effect the necessary drying, there have earth buildings arisen and prospered.
“Cob” building needs less introduction, as it is still well understood and a living craft in several parts of Great Britain, notably in Devonshire and South Wales, where its merits and advantages have been recognised apparently from the earliest times.
All those indeed who are familiar with this method of construction are fully alive to its virtues, and the same is true of Pisé-building, both in chalk and earth, and also of clay-lump.
This book, however, is addressed to those who have in the past built only with stone, brick, concrete, timber and plaster, etc., and who are only now considering a reversion to the more primitive construction here described, through the shortage or absolute lack of their former materials.
It is not so much a question as to whether a Cob or Pisé house is preferable to one of brick or stone or concrete—though there are many who profess a lively preference for the former—but as to whether you will boldly revert to these old and well-tried methods of building, or, in the absence of the ordinary materials, feebly sit down and build nothing at all.