Just looking around on the net and I came across this.... After reading I am looking forward to living in our home even more now! How beautiful does it sound... quiet, calm, solid, sturdy,comfortable, timeless ... Magic!
There’s a certain magic one feels inside a house with thick earthen walls. It’s hard to describe, but easy to notice. Just take a step inside one on a hot summer day and you’ll feel it immediately. It’s cool, of course—everyone knows adobe houses are warm in the winter and cool in the summer—but there’s something else to the feeling that’s a little harder to name. It’s quiet; the house feels solid and sturdy, calming, comfortable, timeless. Inside, you are reacting to the coolness emanating from the walls themselves and the buffering of ambient sounds, but inherently the “je ne sais quoi” of an earthen French country farmhouse or a California mission is actually a part of our evolutionary memory: We are hardwired to be at home in earth.
The idea of what makes a house has changed as much over the millennia as what a house is made of. Long ago, shelter was, well, shelter. Then, gradually it evolved. As human tolerance for discomfort decreased, the desire for features like warmth, spaciousness, and eventually, style, increased. At first houses were made of whatever was available, usually raw earth and raw wood. Over time, a range of manufacturing processes were developed for modifying earth and wood into other shapes and forms. Fired bricks and clay roof tiles are made of earth. Cement, concrete, stucco, and sheetrock also have their roots in earth, since each is the result of mining and processing minerals. The timber industry has progressed from hand-hewn logs to sawn boards to framing lumber and now even to wood chips glued back into the shape of boards.
Most Americans have grown up with the idea that a house is a lightweight box with walls assembled from thin sticks covered on both sides
with even thinner skins. (Some societies think of this as a tent.) The floors and roofs are also built of sticks with equally thin skin coverings. As energy costs increased, builders started using an expanded petrochemical substance— fiberglass insulation—to fill the empty spaces inside the walls, floors, and roofs. Then as energy costs continued to increase, the industry invented another petrochemical product—Tyvek, a sort of plastic bag—to wrap around the entire house. The fiberglass insulation and wrapping are intended to reduce heat loss through the building elements. The image this conjures up for me is of wearing a fiberglass sweater encased in clear plastic wrap. This is a far cry from the magic of thick earth walls.
Not that long ago, houses were built to last for generations. People actually lived in a house long enough to think of it as home. People died in the same house in which they were born. It made sense to invest in longevity if one’s children, grandchildren, and even their grandchildren would be living there. Times have changed of course, and in our fast-paced world few of us expect to die in the same city we were born in, let alone the same house. This doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t still appreciate the special qualities of a house built solidly enough to last for several hundred years.
Think of the savings in natural resources that would result if today’s houses were built to last longer. We could reduce the need to demolish houses and bury them in landfills, and we wouldn’t need to harvest and process virgin resources to rebuild them. A structure constructed of solid materials, whether earth, brick, concrete, or stone, requires a larger investment on the front end, but as the generations roll by and stick houses roll into the landfill the environmental benefits are expressed in healthy dividends. Over time a building settles into its site, creating a sense of attachment and belonging. Trees and shrubs grow to maturity around the building. Successive occupants make their individual contributions to the personality of the house.
