On Cob Balls, Adobe and Daubed Straw Plaits

I recently had the privilege of contributing to a glossary on traditional earth building techniques in four languages – English, Spanish, French and German, working with fellow earth building experts and researchers Franziska Knoll, Maria Pastor Quiles and Claire-Anne de Chazelles.

The idea for the glossary was borne out of necessity – it became apparent when Maria was working with Franziska that a number of German terms for various buildings material types had no Spanish equivalent, and that it was also very difficult to borrow English terms. As a result Maria reached out to Claire-Anne and myself to try to collate terms for different earth building techniques and other related terms regarding construction. The  publication is the product of those exchanges over the last 2 years.

The resulting glossary relies heavily on images to illustrate the subtle variations in the ways in which earth is used as a building material, for massive, load-bearing walls (eg cob, rammed earth, earth blocks and mudbricks), and for non-bearing, mixed building techniques (eg wattle-and-daub and half-timbering).

Together we collated over 50 relevant terms. Many of these didn’t have an easy equivalent (as the uses of earth in building seem to adapt to very local materials and needs). For example the very wonderful term lehmwickel equated very roughly to straw and earth wound around a timber stake, rollos de barro, quenoilles. Other terms caused some significant debate as to what the equivalent would be (particularly as terms in English are sometimes more generic) – for example turf equated to bloque de turba, mottes ou blocs de tourbe, and torfsoden.

We know there will be other terms and methods of using earth as a building material that we can add to this list, but we hope this work starts to build up our knowledge and understanding, and starts to fill in our lost literacy of using earth as a building material. The wealth of language and terms collated shows  how important the connection is between physical, tangible heritage and its language, methods and practices – its intangible heritage.

More information: http://www.lda-lsa.de/en/ 

Knoll, F, Pastor Quiles, M, Chazelles, A and Cooke L. 2019. On cob balls, adobe and daubed straw plaits – a glossary on traditional  earth building techniques for walls in four languages. Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt.

A digital edition will also be available soon