Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk Clay - A Renaissance #231959

The exhaustion of the first edition of this book, within so short a time of its publication, makes it difficult to add much new matter for the reissue now called for, or, in the light of subsequent research and experience, to revise what had already been written.<br><br>Any book that seemed to show a way of meeting the present building difficulties, however partially, was fairly assured of a welcome, but the somewhat unforeseen demand for my small contribution to the great volume of literature on cottage-building is, I think, to be attributed chiefly to its description of Pise-building.<br><br>Of the very large number of letters that reach me from readers of the book, quite ninety-nine out of every hundred are concerned with Pise.<br><br>The other methods of building have their advocates and exponents, but it is clearly Pise that has caught the attention of the public as well as of the Press both at home and abroad, and it is to this method of construction that I have chiefly devoted my attention since the writing of the book as it first appeared.<br><br>In our English climate Pise-building is a summer craft, and the small-scale experiments of one person through a single summer cannot in the nature of things add very greatly to the sum of our knowledge of what is possible with Pise and of what is not.<br><br>Most of the new data have come through the building of Mr. Strachey's demonstration house, an account of which is included in the present volume.<br><br>At the time of writing, various tests are being carried out with the help of the National Physical Laboratory; but the results, though exceedingly encouraging, are not yet ready for publication.