Back to college to build a wall section

No.118 — Read old posts on Tinyfarmlab.com
Reading Time 5 minutes

Ten years.
Ten whole mad years and then they called me back,
not as a gate-hopping student, but as a teacher. 

Sangeeta Bagga, our dear principal, called me back to teach the students building with cob, to talk about our practice, about what we'd been doing out there in the world while the world kept spinning without us.

It was supposed to be a two-day workshop.

We didn't make a bench this time.
We didn't roll a pretty dorodango ball.
We built a wall. 

Because I'd been to the workshops,
taught at a few,
watched people's eyes light up with natural building
and then watched those same eyes go dim
with doubt when they got back to their sites,
alone, without the crowd and the music of it.

You can't build a cob building in two days from scratch
but you can show them the sequence.

We dug a rubble trench.
Laid a French drain.
Built a stem wall.
Then we danced on the cob.
We installed sills.
Framed a window.
Talked about lintels and arches.
Sculpted on the walls.
And at the end, we plastered it with mud and lime both.


It’s not the design that stops a cob house from being built.
It’s the people.

Because where does one even find a mason
who knows how to read soil like a recipe,
who understands that a wall can be grown,
not assembled,
who doesn’t panic when there is no cement bag in sight?

Most clients come to us with the same quiet worry,
“We love this… but who will build it?”

And the honest answer is:
not many people.
Not yet.

So we stopped looking for the “right” people.

We started working with the willing ones.

The curious contractor.
The mason who asks one extra question.
The labourer who doesn’t mind getting their feet dirty.

That’s enough.

Because before any drawing is issued,
before any foundation is marked,
we begin the same way every time.

We build a piece of the house together.

Not on paper.
On-site.

A full-scale wall section.
From the trench to the bottom of the roof.

In two days.

By the end of it,
something shifts.

It’s no longer “your design”
and “their execution”.

It becomes our building.

While building this way,
their eyes would suddenly lit up and say,
“Ye to chobbey wali ki deewar ki tarah hai..”
(It’s like how we built our mud houses earlier, but with straw)


This is exactly what we did in Bandhavgarh.

An ecological resort,
on the edge of a tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh,
where the forest begins just beyond the site.

No specialised cob contractors.
No prior experience.
Just a local team,
a patch of earth,
and two days.

We built a wall,
from foundation to arch.

This is how we work.

Not by bringing a team from outside,
But by building capacity within.

Not by guarding knowledge,
but by transferring it, completely.

We stay involved, of course,
reviewing, correcting, guiding, troubleshooting,
but the hands that build your home
are always local.

Which means:

The knowledge stays.
The confidence stays.
The craft stays.

And long after the project is done,
there are more people in that region
who know how to build with earth.

So if the question in your mind is:

“Can this actually be built?”

The answer is not theoretical.

We’ve done it.
With people who had never done it before.
In places where it had never been done before.

And we’ll do it with you.

All we need
is a site,
and a few curious hands.

We will keep sharing updates from our ongoing projects.

Love and light,
Raghav and Ansh

P.S.: If you are on LinkedIn, let’s connect!


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