Daniel Jones has a special feeling for the Australian Aborigines and conceived of a project to help them protect their heritage. He built an earthbag dome close to the beach at a swampy inlet that is an Aboriginal heritage protection site where an ongoing blockade against unsustainable greedy mansion development continues.
The History Pod ‘Murrong Gunya’ sand house is a labor of love with a humorous flare of design. You can see this in the fanciful plastered image.
The opening of the History Pod at Sandon point is planned for the 17 th December 2010 celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Aboriginal tent embassy and the continued blockade of the developers.
Thanks Owen
I will take this into consideration next time. I was shown the zigzag in an earthbag workshop, perhaps I miss understood but tensile strength wasn’t mentioned. It seemed a good way to attach the wire to the bag easily. I would imagine attaching the wire in circles would be a different process to get it stick onto the bag. Makes sense to lay it in circles. I failed to mention something else is was taught which was to slant the tamped bags slightly down to the outside. I this correct? I did this and it seemed to prevent the bag rolling in when placing another layer. I understand this is different to arch ways. i also thought it could act a bit like thatching for water runoff.
cheers Dan
This would be an easy mistake to make. Zigzagging would provide more attachments points, however, you would lose some of the tensile strength that way.
And yes, you can slope the outside of the bags slightly after each course is leveled.
I found a mistake in the article. Do not zigzag the barbed wire as explained because this will lessen its tensile strength. Place the barbed wire in concentric rings on domes and roundhouses and in straight lines on rectilinear designs.