Cascadia Cob & the Revillageing Revolution

Pre-Order the film
Cascadia Cob & the Revillageing Revolution

Cascadia Cob & the Revillageing Revolution is a documentary film about a massive paradigm shift for shelter -- building houses in the old ways, out of earth, and living together like in the old days, by recreating villages. It is a sprawling film, shot on location from the West Coast to West Africa, from England to Ethiopia. An audiovisual thesis filmed over the course of two years and four continents, Cascadia Cob & the Revillageing Revolution makes the case that earthen homes are the healthiest housing in the world; and that since it still takes a village to raise a healthy child, it is incumbent upon us to transform our suburban sprawl into a new American Dream, urban eco-villages.
The film first establishes the reasons why one might choose to build from earth, hearing from tree-sitting activists defending some the world's last remaining old-growth forests to some of the environmental movement's pre-eminent thinkers, like Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen. Peak Oil expert James Howard Kunstler explains the implications of the end of cheap fossil fuels, and what that is going to mean for the way we acquire food, clothes, and shelter. The social economics are calculated, and one realizes that the End of Suburbia is upon us, and that we must take responsibility for the necessities of life back from government planners and greedy developers.
The origins of earth building in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas are explored, and the ideological reasons for having a direct connection with home and hearth are understood. At the North American School of Natural Building in the rainforests of Oregon, a hands-on cob-building curriculum is taught by cob grand masters. All of the details of building a house with modern conveniences such as plumbing and electricity are touched upon. Legal restrictions and guerilla possibilities for cob building are explored. Upon graduation, the cob builders spread across the country to build, in both a rural context and an urban context.
City Repair is an organization that was founded by cob builders in 1996 in the city of Portland, Oregon to reclaim the streets and make connections in the community, by taking over neglected patches of the urban environment, and converting them into colorful piazzas. Cob building is accessible to people of all ages and abilities, so all members of the community can converge around this activity and recreate living, breathing social networks, instead of avoiding eye contact with one another, and retreating into their single-family homes and biocidal consumerist lifestyles. The cob structures that dot the urban landscape of Portland make it the most liveable city in America.
In the ghetto of Ghost Town, in West Oakland, California, the situation couldn't be more different. All of our society's worst ills are on display here: unemployment, homelessness, boarded-up buildings, drug addiction, racist police. Yet here, too, a small group of activists from all ethnic groups, inspired by the City Repair project in Portland, formed their own chapter and launched a series of public art installations, street paintings, urban interventions, and cob structures. City Repair Oakland West proved that it's not only in the lily-white middle-class suburbs that revillageing is possible, but here, too, in the deindustrialized inner cities, where it's even more necessary.
There are many ways of building structures out of earth, and this film focuses on the technique called cob, developed in the bioregion of Cascadia, the West Coast of North America from British Columbia in the North to Northern California in the South. Also called monolithic adobe, cob is made from a combination of sand, clay, water, and straw, and is mixed by foot, and molded by hand. There are thousands of cob houses across the United Kingdom that were built hundreds of years ago and are still standing to this day. In Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula, there are cob apartment towers seven stories high!
There are many advantages to cob houses, but chiefly among them are: 1) you can build one by yourself, without having to hire "building professionals" to do it for you; 2) the materials are cheap or free, so you don't have to take out a mortgage and be a slave to the bank and a job that you hate; 3) the earthen walls absorb the energy of the sun and any internal heat sources, so the home remains cool in the summer and warm in the winter, at next to no cost; 4) it's healthy for the earth -- making the materials causes no environmental damage; 5) it's healthy for humans -- the materials don't off-gas toxic chemicals; 6) and best of all, you can sculpt the house into beautiful, funky shapes!
All of the modern cob-building movement's major players were interviewed for this film: pioneers Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley, and Michael Smith; bread oven builder and master baker Kiko Denzer; City Repair co-founder Mark Lakeman; and many other natural builders of some of the most beautiful cob houses that exist today. The process of actually building a structure out of cob from start to finish is stylistically documented in detail, for those wishing to build their own earthen home. And of course, dozens of awe-inspiring cob projects are visited in every type of climate, all over the globe.
From the film maker of the revolutionary scratch video THE RED PILL (2003), David Sheen has also been documenting, studying, designing, and building ecological housing since 2001, learning almost every single type of alternative building technique. He apprenticed with cob masters Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley in Oregon, and at Michael Smith's Emerald Earth. He also learned biomimicry, the study of nature's design principles and its application to human habitats, under evolutionary architect Eugene Tsui. Sheen's films have been screened at film festivals from Hollywood to Africa, and they are very popular in activist circles across the continent.