A shade of residential green

Cob is a mixture of mud, sand and straw, which can be "moulded" in order to form walls, and indeed this is the material that one Romanian architect has decided to revert to. Ileana Mavrodin claims she started to build her first cob house as an experiment in 2004. Having just returned to Romania after twelve years of living in Canada, she bought the land needed for under USD 2,000 and spent the next year building her cottage. "The place was perfect for building a cob house," she explains. "It's a question of a southern exposure, with a clay sandy soil and a nearby river," she explained, adding that it is necessary to gather all the construction materials locally. Such traditional houses require no air conditioning, since they remain cool in the summer and retain their heat in the winter. Now she is helping to build similar houses throughout the country, with two under construction near Timişoara, two near Bucharest, one near Sângeorz-Băi and one near Curtea de Arge?. She urges t