Photo by Povy Kendal Atchinson / povy.com
By Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Twelve years ago, builder and timber framer Robert Laporte listened to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation, lecture on sthapatya ved, the ancient Indian art of creating prosperity, health, and tranquility through the orientation, proportion, and placement of buildings. It was in the Golden Dome, an assembly of meditators in Fairfield, Iowa, where Laporte had an epiphany that altered the sequence of his career and his life.
“In sthapatya ved,” Maharishi said, “we build in such a way that everything nourishes everything.” This intrigued Laporte. Visions flashed through his mind: a pair of hands chiseling a piece of wood; horses transporting logs to a building site just yards away. Next came a tranquil water scene, but Laporte also saw dead fish floating on the surface of this river, a pipe with green liquid spilling out, and a factory spewing smoke. Laporte understood intrinsically that this factory made building materials. “I went out of the dome that day and just started thinking, what do I build with?” he says.
That journey transported Laporte across the world and lead him to a new career as a teacher of natural building methods. And it all began with one house.
Iowa’s Premium Building Material
Laporte decided to build a home to withstand Iowa’s rough winters and hot summers using local, natural, unprocessed materials. He wanted to participate in every aspect of the building process rather than hiring it out.
He visited the library, found a book on climatology, and learned that Germany’s climate was nearly identical to Iowa’s—an exciting discovery given that European building history stretches far beyond that of the American Midwest. “Before the Industrial Revolution, people were basically using building materials that nature had manufactured—materials at hand,” Laporte points out. “There were hundreds, actually thousands, of years of history related to timber frame building and the systems that dovetail with it.”
Laporte spent six weeks in Germany, studying Leichtlehmbau, a mixture of clay and straw used to construct walls on timber-frame homes. The clay provides insulating mass, holds straw together, and deters fire, decay, rodents, and mold. It provides the walls tensile strength and insulates by trapping air in its cylinders. Laporte believed that Leichtlehmbau was perfect for Iowa, where the soil is full of clay deposits and there’s no shortage of straw. “Iowa has export-grade clay,” Laporte says, pointing out the environmental importance of using local materials. “I call it Iowa Gold. It’s some of the best, if not the best, clay I’ve ever worked with. It’s a premium building response for Iowa.”
A Dream Becomes Reality
Outside of Fairfield, Laporte bought five acres and set to work. Atop a rubble-trench grade beam of Iowa limestone, he constructed a traditional mortise and tenon timber frame using local pine, mostly salvaged from the Fairfield power company, which had removed trees growing into power lines. He wrapped a straw-clay wall twelve inches thick around the frame and clad it in cedar siding—which he probably wouldn’t repeat. “Eight years ago, I didn’t have the experience I have today with earth plasters,” he explains. “I wouldn’t hesitate to plaster a building in Iowa today.”
With help from people interested in learning Leichtlehmbau construction methods, including local students, Laporte erected the skeleton —the timber frame “bones” and the straw-clay “flesh”—within three months. Still lacking stone flooring, wood shakes on the roof, and running water, the home had already acquired a nurturing quality that Laporte had never encountered. “There was no other building I had built or worked on that felt that complete, that safe.” he says. “You wanted to go and be in that space.”
About this time, a friend took Caree Connet to see the home. She too, fell in love with the earthen floor and the massive beams, the sunlight filtering from overhead skylights. “It was so quiet and peaceful,” Caree remembers. “I said to my friend, ‘I want to live in a house just like this.’ But I was busy being a single mom, working full time, and living in a little box in town. It was one of those impossible dreams.”
The home provided a lesson. “The remaining five months of effort never improved the feeling of that house,” Laporte says. “What I learned was that the soul of this house is captured in the bones and flesh and skin. It’s not in the bracelets and the dresses—all the things you cloak the house with. The important thing I got from this experience is that you have one chance to really create your home—and it’s not the dressings, it’s the core underneath all that.”
For a remarried Caree, who with her new husband found Laporte’s house on the market four years later, the trappings only enhanced her appreciation. Laporte’s love of Japanese carpentry had led him to include sliding shoji screens, hand-planed timbers, and rice paper lamps. “I walked in and said, ‘It’s even better than before,”’ says Caree, who realized her dream by purchasing the home from Laporte. “Everything was just perfect.”
A Safe Haven
Laporte has since built more than thirty ecologically sound homes and offers workshops across the country; he says the most important book he’s read on building is the Audubon Society’s Bird Nests of North America. “A robin doesn’t fly over to Texas if it’s building a nest in Missouri,” he says. “It uses what’s at hand. If we all would use materials the way birds use them, there would be no shortages of building supplies.”
Caree echoes that image, describing her home as “a nest, a womb.” A writing teacher, she invites students to the house to stir their creative juices. She revels in the sturdy, quiet protection of the walls and the wood beams. “It utterly and totally feels like Mother’s at home—like nothing could ever happen to you here,” she says. “A lot of my life, things haven’t gone as I had hoped. To have your dream come true is almost too good to be true. Every day I just thank God, among other things, for our house.”
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