Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay

Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay: A Renaissance (2nd edition) is by Clough Williams-Ellis, with an introduction by J. St. Loe Strachey. A second edition, revised and enlarged, is dated July 1920, after a first edition in September 1919. The text says that there is not merely a shortage, but an actual famine everywhere as regards the things out of which houses are made, and that bricks are wanted by the ten thousand million, but there are practically no bricks in sight.

On plastering, the text says that the wall should first be thoroughly dry, and that if dry only externally whilst damp within, it has been found that the moisture is apt subsequently to attack the plaster and cause it to fall off in flakes. A test described in the text applied a load gradually, and the wall collapsed under 16½ tons, equal to 168 lbs. per super. foot of floor space. A frontispiece shows a cob house built by Mr. Ernest Gimson, near Budleigh Salterton, Devon.