Modern cob buildings

An example of a modern, Pacific Northwest-style cob home. The exterior cob wall has had plaster applied to it for an attractive, uniform appearance.

One of the more desirable attributes of cob is the ability for creating completely unique, handmade architecture; including aesthetic designs of an artistic nature.

When Kevin McCabe built a two-story, four bedroom cob house in England in 1994, it was reputedly the first cob residence built in the country in 70 years. His methods remained very traditional; the only innovations he added were using a tractor to mix the cob itself, and adding sand or shillet (a gravel of crushed shale) to reduce the shrinkage.

From 2002 to 2004, sustainability enthusiast Rob Hopkins initiated the building of a cob house for his family, the first new one in Ireland in about one hundred years. It was undertaken as a community project, but destroyed by an unknown arsonist shortly before completion.^[3] This house, located at The Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability in County Cork, is being rebuilt (2010). There are also a number of other modern cob houses completed and more planned including a public education centre.

In 2000-2001, a modern, four-bedroom cob house in Worcestershire, UK designed byAssociated Architects was sold for £999,000. Cobtun House was built in 2001 and won theRoyal Institute of British Architects' Sustainable Building of the Year award in 2005. The total construction cost was £300,000, but the metre-thick cob outer wall cost only £20,000.

In the Pacific Northwest of the US there has been a resurgence of cob building both as an alternative building practice and one desired for its form, function and cost effectiveness. There are more than ten cob houses in the Southern Gulf Islands of British Columbia built by Pat Hennebery, Tracy Calvert, Elke Cole and the Cobworks workshops.

In 2007, Ann and Gord Baird began constructing a two-story cob house in Victoria, British Columbia for an estimated $210,000 CDN. The 2,150 sq. ft. home includes heated floors, solar panels and a southern exposure for passive solar heating.

The building process known as "Oregon Cob" is one which was refined by Welsh architect Ianto Evans and researcher Linda Smiley in the 1980s. Oregon Cob integrates the variation of wall layup technique which uses loaves of mud mixed with sand and straw with a rounded architectural stylism.

Das Park Hotel by Andreas Strauss

The idea of dasparkhotel was born as a mixture out of memories, ideas and emotions about my personal traveling style and the needs and wishes of some people around me, people I met around the world. Finally I was dreaming of something like an easy access minimal accommodation on the places where we wanted to travel and also at the places or cities where we mostly living.

It is a little comfortable small housing unit, just like a coin locker where friends or other people can sleep in and safely store private belongings, reload their personal and their technical devices batteries. To work with a ‘ready-made’ is mostly based on my somehow already traditional work style which means that I cause of many reasons like to reuse or new-use existing things, structures, objects witch are known for a different use.

The Tube is maid sense cause of their immense solidity which brings a real secure feeling when you sleep in public space, a very proper thermal behavior, easy set up and finally you don’t even hear something from the outside, except someone kicks against the wooden door. However hot weather it may be, its inside never be hot and it just putted somewhere and no one with out a heavy crane will be able to move or remove it.

The Tube is a standard part which can be organized at every second concrete factory all over Europe and if you decide to close the hotel you only have to take the door and the interior out and give it back to the guys who dig it into the ground for the reason it was maid for.

The inside surface witch we only clear varnished gave a surprisingly nice and ‘body-friendly’ structure and finally each of the tubes got individual a wall-painting designed and done by the Austrian Artist Thomas Latzel Ochoa. Our Number-code-locks were really online at the beginning because of the sort of nice system the local power company provided. We had internet through the normal electro cable and a modem that you only plug in the socket. That will be changed to a more independent system this year to give us the chance to set up a hotel on places where you for example, maybe only have the chance to collect the electricity needed via solar-power.