Published by City Farmer, Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture
City Farmer's Cob Shed - It has a Living Green Roof
Sculptor, George Rammell, Donates Haida artist Bill Reid's Clay to Cob Project
"The clay I provided belonged to Haida artist Bill Reid. It provided the form for many of Bill's sculpture projects including the "Whale" at the aquarium, and the huge bronze "Spirit Canoe" at the airport. I also used it for my bear track project where I had a Grizzly Bear walk over 15 meters of clay from which I cast the event. It's great to know this clay, that has such a history on the Coast, now forms the surfaces on your project."
George Rammell, sculpture instructor at Capilano College, worked with Bill Reid for 10 years on 14 projects. Their clay was used to make the clay plaster which covers the outside of the City Farmer cob shed.
Landmarks: A touch of Tolkien Emerges at Kits Demo Garden
Story in the West Ender newspaper. "When completed, the tool shed will have a living green roof, a surrounding bench area and an impressively sculpted cob cooking oven. It will be festooned with a relief sculpture depicting the stratification beneath the topsoil surface: rocks, roots, old fossils, shells and some gnome-like creatures. The door to the structure is a work of art itself, resembling a rounded ship's hull, and several inches thick."
City Farmer's Green Roof on the Cob Shed
Photos of the roof planted, our goat, and Arctic roof gardens from long ago.
Four Cob Slide Shows Showing How We Built the Shed and Oven
We'd like to thank the Vancouver Foundation, TD Friends of the Environment Foundation and Mountain Equipment Co-op for generously helping us with this project.
Map showing the location of our garden at 2150 Maple Street.
The virtual image created before the cob shed was built. "The image was created in Maya 4.5. I used a custom light rig to simulate global illumination on the house. The plant-life was done with Maya's built in Paint Effects and finally the image was composited in Adobe's Photoshop." (Thor Lewis - April 2002)
Over 50% of the world's population lives in structures made of earth materials! City Farmer's Compost Demonstration Garden in Kitsilano is to be the site of Vancouver's first cob garden shed. Cob is an ancient building method using clay, sand and straw. Building with earthen materials pre-dates the pyramids. All over the world there are beautiful buildings both ancient and contemporary, built of earthen materials. Only recently is earthen building being revived in North America. There are dozens of houses up and down the Pacific West Coast built of Rammed Earth, Strawbale and Cobb.
John Freeman of ERTH Design Consultants built a small garden shed (sculptured building) for City Farmer in 2003 for the enjoyment of all garden visitors. City Farmer is an urban agricultural advocacy group in Vancouver BC teaching composting, organic food gardening, sustainability issues and now green-building techniques. This building is the first cob building in a public space in Canada. "We are starting the seed of green building in the core of the city."
"The structure is finished with an exterior clay 'litema', pronounced DEE TAY MA (African natural plaster) and an interior finish of clay-based plaster (south-western roots). Windows, wood work, floor materials, insulating issues, toxicity, electrical/plumbing integration, living roofs, foundations, doors, arches, structural/seismic concerns are all addressed."
John Campbell Freeman - Bio
John Freeman of ERTH Design Consultants is a landscape
designer and green builder. John has been involved in numerous green
building projects throughout B.C. including a cob garden shed for
Lifecycles, an environmental group in Victoria, BC; a straw bale
structure for Camp Narnia at Shawnigan Lake; and a cob house on Denman
Island. John has also designed and built gardens throughout the lower
mainland and Vancouver Island.
For information on cob building, contact:
John Freeman
ERTH design+building+consulting
erthdesign@me.com
www.erth.ca
Check out these related links:
- Saving The Salsbury Drive Cob Garden
- Stanley Park Earthen Architecture Project
- www.cobworks.com
- Down To Earth Building Bee
- www.calearth.org
- www.deatech.com/cobcottage/
- Brick Oven
Page
- Build
Your Own Earth Oven - book
- Books
about cob building fom Singing Frog Books
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