Recently Kimi Ishikawa posted this comment on the blog post about building their tire bale house in New Mexico: I hear people referring to tire bales as “thermal mass” and others referring to them as “insulation.” It can’t be both, right? Aren’t “thermal mass” and “insulation” mutually exclusive? I understand “thermal mass” to be a … Read more
The St Michael and All Angels Anglican Church in Clyde, New Zealand was built in 1877 with schist stone. It was the focus for the local community for nearly 150 years until falling numbers made it uneconomical to run and it was put up for sale. The property has a Historic Place heritage listing. People … Read more
The 9th International Hemp Building Symposium is to be held next Tuesday 15th- Wednesday 16th September 2020. It will still take place but in a different format as only online Virtual Tours of International Projects. The Symposium will feature a selection of Virtual Tours of Hemp building projects of 20 minutes duration each. The tours … Read more
With walls made from old tires packed with earth, as well as upcycled glass bottles and cans, Earthships have always been built with mainly found materials. The home provides its own energy (with photovoltaics, passive solar and geothermal tubes), water (rainwater and even dew-water capture) and grows food in the greenhouse (necessary for temperature regulation … Read more
Gabions are wire cages filled with stones and they can used to create walls and many other projects, as the graphic shown below illustrates. We have featured the use of gabions in other blog posts, such as DYI Gabion Walls, Gabion Band Stone Construction, Gabion Beams for Earthquake Resilience This graphic is courtesy of www.wirefence.co.uk
Sand is one of those natural materials that we take for granted; it seems so abundant that we could never run out of it. Both natural building and conventional building rely on sand for many aspects of construction. It is an essential component of adobe, cob, rammed earth, earthen plaster, stucco and concrete. It is … Read more