Question: I dream of building a small eco friendly country ‘cabin’. My location will be in Alberta or BC, Canada. Do you prefer earthbag technique now over straw bale? Site will be a cold climate compared to many of your examples. I do have concerns on moisture and rot for essentially an organic material. — Scott
Climate
Ark Soaring in the Sky
Kikuma Watanabe is an associate professor at Kochi University of Technology in Japan and is responsible for the overall design of this project. The owner is Kagayaku Inochi (glorious life), a Japanese NPO. This school for orphans is in Sangkhlaburi village, Thailand, located near the borderline between Thailand and Myanmar. In this area there are a lot of poor people who immigrated from Myanmar. This school aims to provide sustainable poverty alleviation in the area.
To provide a good future for the children, they hoped that the school would be designed to realize their dreams. So, at first the teacher asked the children to draw the dream of the school building. One of them drew a flying ship as his dream. They adapted his idea, and tried to translate the drawing into architecture.
Evolution of the Pantry Concept
This is what the pantry looks like today. I have finished all of the bag work and am now building the framework for the roof. The large turquoise pipe in the foreground is the inlet air vent that goes all the way down to the bottom of the hole with an elbow through the bag wall. In the distance, next to the motor home, is a 1500 gallon water tank that I got a great deal on. That tank will be dropped into the pantry hole for storage of rain water off the roof of the garage. The vertical walls that will meet the roof of the pantry will be cordwood construction, providing good insulation to keep the panty temperate; the roof will be well insulated as well.
The Myth of Earthbag Insulation
There is a consistent myth floating around the internet that common earthbag buildings are naturally super insulating. I don’t know how this idea got started but it has certainly spread widely. I see it written into basic descriptions of earthbag building on forums and websites frequently, often by folks who would appear to be experts … Read more
Hyperadobe with EarthenHand
This is one of the best videos I’ve seen in illustrating how to go about building a project. In just a few short minutes it manages to show the construction process from foundation to roof, using lots of animated portions to speed it up. There are several particularly worthwhile aspects of this 800 square foot … Read more
Additional Passive Cooling Strategies for Hot Climates
The following list includes dozens of low tech, low cost ways to cool buildings in hot climates passively without electricity or machinery, i.e., passive cooling or natural cooling. This list is in addition to the 11 or so simple passive cooling techniques that I talked about in my video the other day. Altogether there are over 50 practical methods for cooling your home sustainably.