Roofs

The Carriage House

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About 15 years ago I built the “Carriage House” using a prefabricated steel vault as a supporting structure for earthbags filled with scoria as insulation. It is a two story affair, with the lower one being a garage/shop and the upper one an office and storage space. I located a new 34′ X 16′ steel … Read more

How We Built Our House – Part Two: The Grass Roof

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“It’s been ten years since we designed and built our house, so it seems appropriate to start an occasional series about it all. Building your own house has to be one of the most exhilarating and exciting things anyone can do in their lives. (It’s also expensive, exhausting and stressful too, but we wont go there for now…)

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Weaving Studio Plan

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In the early 1970’s I was commissioned to design and build a small weaving studio on property located along the coast in Bolinas, California. The client was a weaving apprentice with my sister, who was living on rented property with her family. There was room on that property to place a small studio separated from the main house, and that is where she wanted me to build the studio. Obviously it would be foolish to place a permanent structure on rented property, so I suggested that I design it in such a way that it could fairly easily be dismantled and moved elsewhere if necessary. She liked the idea, so that is what I did.

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Rebuilding Nepal, One Earthbag at a Time

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rebuildingnepalRebuilding Nepal, One Earthbag at a Time is a short Kindle book assembled by a team of eight volunteers who went to Palchok in the Trishuli Valley to rebuild a school in the fall of 2015. Because of the remote location they needed to plan for every aspect of the project, and this book is primarily advice for others who might try to do something similar. Besides actually building the school, they wanted to introduce the earthbag technique to the villagers so they could continue rebuilding this way. The team had raised enough funds from friends and family to accomplish this goal. They were there for only two weeks, but they got that small school built! Graeme Howell was the mastermind behind this endeavor.

The first chapter introduces what they consider to be the essential building process and suggests how to make this happen efficiently. Because of the number of volunteers, including folks from the village, they wanted to keep everybody busy and make sure there weren’t bottlenecks in the process. For this reason they had people filling and sewing bags right away, even before the foundation trench was prepared. Likewise, they had people screening soil for the eventual plaster.

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The Case for Catenary Roofs

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Low cost, simple to build catenary roofs use minimal materials
Low cost, simple to build catenary roofs use minimal materials

Excerpt from the “Journal of the National Institute of Building Sciences,” February 2016:
“The Swiss civil engineer and contractor Heinz Isler (1926-2009) is regarded as one of the pioneers of shell structures. He gained renown for his experimental, physical methods of form-finding and the resulting expressive shell structures produced in thin-walled concrete, and first triggered his lifelong fascination and professional work with such structures by draping a saturated bed sheet in freezing weather to form a catenary shell before inverting it. He proved that, what gravity forms when inverted, is resistant to the forces of gravity.

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Low Cost Bamboo Truss System

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This $200 12’x18’ bamboo roof by Joao Boto Caeiro is one of the strongest, best bamboo roofs in the world.
This $200 12’x18’ bamboo roof by Joao Boto Caeiro is one of the strongest, best bamboo roofs in the world.

Most of our readers know the world’s forests are being rapidly depleted. Sustainable alternatives are desperately needed. Low cost bamboo is a promising alternative building material because it’s rapidly renewable and widely available. Bamboo is especially well suited for Nepal that is in dire need of scalable solutions that can help rebuild the country. Ms. Neelima Basnet, a Nepali freelance architect, helped implement Joao Boto Caeiro’s bamboo truss method in Chapagaun near Kathmandu. Now there are 22 finished houses.

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