For me Pise de terre, ever since I heard of it, has offered special
attractions. It, and it alone provides, or if one must be cautious,
appears to provide the way to turn an old dream of mine and of many
other people into a reality. My connection with the problem of housing,
and especially of rural housing, _i.e._ cottage housing, now nearly a
quarter of a century old, has been on the side of cheap material.
Rightly or wrongly (I know that many great experts in building matters
think quite wrongly), I have had the simplicity to believe that if you
are to get cheap housing you must get it by the use of cheap material.
It has always seemed to me that there is no other way. What more natural
than first to ask why building material was so dear, and then what was
the cause of its dearness? I found it in the fact that bricks are very
expensive things to make, that stones are very expensive things to
quarry, that cements are very expensive things to manufacture, and worst
of all, that all these things are very heavy and very expensive to drag
about the country, and to "dump" on the site in some lonely situation
where cottages or a small-holder's house and outbuildings are, to use
the conventional phrase, "urgently demanded." Therefore, to the
unfeigned amusement, nay, contempt of all my architectural friends,
I spent a great deal of my leisure in the years before the war in
racking my brains in the search for cheap material. My deep desire was
to find something in the earth out of which walls could be made. My
ideal was a man or group of men with spades and pickaxes coming upon the
land and creating the walls of a house out of what they found there.
I wanted my house, my cottage in "Cloud-Cuckoo Land," to rise like the
lark from the furrows. But I was at once dissuaded from my purpose by
cautious and scientific persons. The chemists, if they did not scoff
like the architects, were visibly perturbed. "Your dream is impossible,"
they said. "Nature abhors it as much as she used to be supposed to abhor
a vacuum. If your soil is clay, and you can afford the time and cost of
erecting kilns, and bringing coal to the spot to make the bricks, you
can no doubt turn the earth on the spot into a house, but even then you
had far better buy them of those that sell. Your dream of having some
chemical which will mix with the earth and turn it into a kind of stone,
is the merest delusion. It is the nature of the earth to kill anything
in the way of cement that is mixed with it. For example, even a little
earth will kill concrete or mortar. Unless you wash your sand most
carefully, and free it from all earth stain, you will ruin your concrete
blocks." I appeared to be literally "up against" a brick wall. It was
that or nothing. And then, and when things seemed at their very worst,
a kind correspondent of _The Spectator_ showed me a way of escape.
I felt like a man lost in underground passages who suddenly sees a tiny
square of light and knows that it means the way out. Somebody wrote,
from South Africa I think, asking why I didn't find the thing I wanted
in Pise de terre, much used in Australia, and occasionally in Cape
Colony. Then came a rush of enlightenment. People who had seen and even
lived in such houses wrote to _The Spectator_, and the world indeed for
the moment seemed alive with Pise de terre. I was even lent the
"Farmer's Handbook" of New South Wales, in which the State Government
provides settlers with an elaborate description of how to build in Pise,
and how to make the necessary shuttering for doing so. It was then, too,
that I began to hear of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century buildings
of Pise in the Rhone Valley. In fact, everybody but I seemed to know all
there was to be known about Pise de terre. For the moment indeed, the
situation seemed like that described in _Punch's_ famous picture of the
young lady and the German professor. "_What is Volapuk?_" asks the young
lady. "_Ze universal language_," says the professor. "_Where is it
spoken?_" "_No vairs._" Pise de terre appeared to be the universal
system of building, but as far as I could make out, it was practised "no
vairs," or at any rate not in Europe.
[Headnote: Experiments with "Pise"]