Aime Desponds created an amazing casa de barro, or mud house, at his rancho Mogorcito. The process is well documented at his website cobinbaja.blogspot.com.
View the entire building process here »

Aime Desponds was born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1940. After graduating from mechanical engineering in the 1960s, he traveled to mexico where he worked at his uncle’s restaurant. Since 1985, Aime worked as a chef at a restaurant in Santa Ana, California until his retirement in 2005.

Aime was seeking a new twist in his life, and in 1992 he found out that while enjoying the culinary art, he also wanted to be involved in drawing and painting. He then enrolled in art classes in some community colleges in Orange County. It was in looking for information on how to build a clay oven, that he discovered natural construction. In 2003 he took a cob workshop with Linda and Ianto Evans in the Santa Barbara mountains. The contact with mud as a building material and a sculptable matter was an amazing discovery that would affect his life forever.

As he plunged his bare hands and feet into the mud, he felt instantly connected with nature. He knew that this fantastic discovery would fit perfectly with his way of thinking and his artful soul. Thus, he decided to build himself a cob house.

I’ve been drawing buildings for some time now. It’s really taken over my drawing time… instead of drawing pictures of landscapes or pretty little flowers I spend my time creating what I would call organic architecture. I hope to post more drawings, plans, and ideas as time goes on.

Drawings Gallery »

A while back, I posted about my experiences constructing a Rocket Stove.
Since then I’ve added the finishing touches to the Moonunit Rocket stove.

It was a project within a project. It’s guts, made of firebrick, a 55 and 30 gallon drum, vermiculite and clay and stove tubing, went together pretty quickly, but it took me a while to finish the mass part. Several tons of earthbags, urbanite, rock, sand and cob went into building up the mass. The finish floor swallowed much of the body of the stove, about 1 1/2 feet worth. What was left, above the floor, turned into a organically shaped bench and bed.
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I didn’t have a lot of experience building when I began this project, but I always enjoyed making forts and helping with the family house when I was young. I’ve worked with sculpture before, and in a way that’s what Project Moonunit is to me… that or a goat shed, winery, art studio, guest house, a mud hut, hacienda, ‘dobe, spaceship, pod, playground and home.

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I found an earthen oven near the Taos Food Center and Community Garden. You see a lot of this style oven ( horno - pronounced ‘orre-no’ ) around here. I especially like the relief artwork around the ’smoke hole’.

More photos »