The wattle was a wall made of sticks. Thin branches woven between upright stakes like a basket turned on its side. The wattle was the first wall that was not a rock. Somebody looked at a basket and said if I make this tall enough I can live behind it. The wattle was architecture's first act of imagination. The rock wall was obvious. The wattle wall was an idea.

The wattle was woven. You drove the stakes into the ground and wove the branches between them over and under over and under and the weave held itself together the way a fabric holds itself together. The wattle was the building's textile. Every wall was a weaving and every weaving was different because every set of branches was different. The wattle was handmade by definition because there is no machine that weaves sticks between stakes. The drywall is a machine's idea of a wall. The wattle was a person's.

The wattle was covered with daub. You smeared a mixture of clay and straw and dung on the wattle and the daub filled the gaps and the wattle held the daub and the daub kept the wind out. The wattle was the skeleton and the daub was the skin. Together they were a wall and the wall was warm in winter and cool in summer because the daub was thick and the sticks were flexible and the wall breathed. The drywall does not breathe. The drywall seals. Sealing and breathing are opposite strategies for the same problem.

The wattle lasted. A wattle wall covered in daub and protected by a roof lasted five hundred years. There are wattle walls in England older than the printing press. The branches petrified. The daub turned to stone. The wall that started as sticks and mud became something harder than the brick that replaced it. The wattle did not know it would last five hundred years. The wattle was built to last until the next season. It lasted until the next century. Ambition is overrated. Competence lasts.

Nobody builds with wattle anymore. The framing lumber and the drywall replaced the stick and the mud and the building went up faster and straighter and the building did not breathe and the building did not flex and the building cracked where the wattle would have bent. The wattle bent because the wattle was alive. The sticks remembered being a tree. The two-by-four does not remember. The two-by-four has been cut and dried and planed until it has forgotten everything except being straight.

See also: Clapboard, Grout