The folks at Phangan Earthworks in Thailand have created a marvelously meditative structure using earthbags placed between existing large boulders that was then capped by a wood-framed roof and eventually thatched. The result is a symphony of forms that mirror nature and quiet the mind. The open, well-vented design remains pleasant at all times.
You can read about how they built this and see many more photos at earthbagbuilding.com
This is exactly the kind of thing I want to do. I just bought a beautiful piece of land with wonderful huge granite boulders on it. How on earth do I begin the permit process for such a thing? I don’t want to be restricted to a set of costly pre-stamped blueprints!
It would be nearly impossible to get something like that permitted. Use the search engine to search this site for keywords such as “building codes”, “rural areas” and “counties” to find more info.
How beautiful.
Snugging up the earthbags was easy, but it was a labor of love to fit the wood flooring in, I’m sure.
Often beauty results from a severe simplicity. I wonder if they had ideas of adding different shapes in before they reduced it to this wonderful shape.
These boulders are a nice configuration for practical reasons. it looks like they stick up above the soil level around the building. If they were lower, there might be a real tendency to wick water in on them…
There are boulders all over the site. It’s a rocky hillside that makes conventional building impractical or impossible. Instead, they ended up with incredibly beautiful structures.
This building is one of my favorites and shows how there is almost no limit to building with earthbags. It’s sort of like a large art project, but also very practical because you can live in it.