Always necessity has been the mother of invention. The war has proved
her prolific indeed, and her teeming offspring are seen in the
multiplicity of war contrivances and the bewildering array of
substitutes for the once common things of our daily life. Where
necessity has been most dire, there invention has unfailingly come to
the rescue with the most amazing "Ersatz" products to replace the
vanished originals.
At any rate it pleases us to attribute the truly astonishing feats of
the Germans in this direction to their greater need rather than to any
superior ingenuity or enterprise on their part.
That their success was often no more than moderate will be readily
admitted by anyone who, for instance, has made trial of their "Ersatz"
cigars or ration coffee.
Still, need did at least awaken prodigious effort, ingenuity, and
enterprise--all co-ordinated and concentrated on the business of making
good a hundred paralysing deficiencies.
[Headnote: The House Famine]
In this present matter of National Housing the shortage of all the
generally recognised building materials as well as of actual houses is
extreme and grave. Effort, ingenuity, and enterprise in overcoming these
insufficiencies are as urgently and vitally necessary to England in
Peace as ever they were to Germany in war. Little will be said here of
the direct and intimate connection between good houses and good
citizens.
It is assumed that those who go to the pains of reading this book have
at least glanced at the Housing Reports, and drawn certain disquieting
conclusions from the criminal and vital statistics with which the case
for reform is reinforced.
In a recent speech the Registrar-General said: "War does not only fill
the graves, it also empties the cradles." This is no less true of bad
and inadequate housing.
Only the most reckless and thick-skinned of the poorer population will
adventure on marriage and the bringing up of a family whilst the odds
against decent and reasonable housing persist as at present.
True, "Housing" is very properly being given considerable prominence in
the press, and scarcely a day passes but there appears an article or
letter dealing with this question.
Usually we are left but little wiser than we were, whilst if we chance
to know something about the subject, the general tone of vague
cheerfulness that pervades them all fills us with misgiving.
Nothing is easier or pleasanter or more popular than to make airy
promises or predictions about the "Homes for Happy Human Beings" that,
somehow, are to be prepared for our returned soldiers, and for all those
others who are housed miserably or not at all. It is very easy to
predict and promise, but without adequate materials performance is not
merely difficult, it is impossible.
There is a world-shortage of almost every manufactured or cultivated
product; there is also a labour famine, a money famine, and a transport
famine.
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.
"Pise 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 Pise-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.
[Illustration:
+Front and Back Elevations of Cottage designed by Sir Edwin
Lutyens and Mr. Alban Scott.+
This Cottage can be built in Cob, Pise, Concrete, Stone, or Brick.]
[Illustration:
+Plan of Cottage designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Mr. Alban Scott.+]
It is not so much a question as to whether a Cob or Pise 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.
For that will, inevitably, be the alternative for a great many private
persons. National and Public-Utility Housing Schemes and public and
industrial works of all sorts will naturally and properly claim priority
in the matter of all building materials--and the private individual, so
far as he can secure such materials at all, will only do so at a price
that is the logical outcome of an unprecedented demand and an ominously
inadequate supply.
[Headnote: Local Materials]
Timber, tiles, slates, plaster, and ironmongery he must still purchase
and transport as best he may--but the shell of his house, its outer
walls at least, could and should be raised from the soil of the site
itself by the employment of the simplest gear and a small amount of
unskilled local labour.
So acute indeed is the transport problem, and so small is the hope of
any substantial improvement in the near future, that any expedient
tending to ease matters in this respect is worthy of the most serious
attention.
The restrictions imposed by high freights will of themselves tend to
check the often senseless and unnecessary importation of materials
foreign to a district, which in the past was the despair of architects
of the "traditional" school.
It was a wasteful practice that had gone far to obliterate all but the
most robust traits in the old and very diverse local building
conventions of rural England.
Formerly, he who wilfully carried bricks into Merioneth or the
Cotswolds, or slates into Kent or ragstone-rubble into Middlesex, was
guilty of no more than foolishness and an aesthetic solecism.
Under present conditions such action should render him liable to
prosecution and conviction on some such count as "Wasting the shrunken
resources of his country in a time of great scarcity, . . . in that he
did wantonly transport material for building the walls of a house by
rail and road from A to B when suitable and sufficient material of
another sort and at no higher cost existed, and was readily accessible
hard by the site at B."
That indeed is our one chance of salvation, the existence and use of
"the materials of another sort hard by the site."
These natural materials and their appropriate use in building will be
considered in the following pages.
* * *
The Lutyens-Scott cottage, of which illustrations are given, is designed
with a special view to the use of such local materials as cob, chalk,
and Pise, though it could also be constructed without appreciable
modification in stone or brick.
It is thus a model of unusually universal application, providing, too,
accommodation such as is certain to be demanded by the new and more
educated generation that it is the aim of the country to produce.
I
_COB_