“The Natural Building School was founded in 2008 and has been hosting a variety of popular courses on Natural Building, Permaculture, and Appropriate Technologies. Return to the Forest strives to educate the world on sustainable building practices to complement the global movement in ecological living.
Connecting participants with Mayan building experts, the school also holds space for sharing and applying indigenous knowledge to natural building. Our local experts educate on making natural ropes and nets from the Maguey (Sisal) cactus, natural plasters using the Nopal (Prickly Pear) cactus and bajareque walls. Incorporating these and other indigenous techniques, Return to the Forest develops new building techniques that incorporate Mayan building practices with international strategies: often using bamboo and adobe or bajareque on the same wall.
A course with Return to the Forest will open your eyes to the vast range of natural building materials and techniques that provide reliable shelter for all climates.”
I’m interested in possibly building something like this next year. Looks like a fun project. Compare this design with Toda Huts from a previous blog post. https://naturalbuildingblog.siterubix.com/toda-huts/
Toda Huts use bundles of small bamboo instead of large curved bamboo. Curved bamboo is easy to find. The photo above shows an important detail. Notice how the bamboo is joined at the ridge. It looks like they used bent pipe inside the bamboo to join the pieces. Also it looks like they’ve pieced together straight and curved sections of bamboo. I’d rather spend a day wandering a river bottom to find one piece sections of the desired curvature.
Here’s a photo of a Toda Hut being built that shows the details.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fd/Toda_house_building.JPG