One key to affordable natural building is to use low cost, locally available materials. Look especially for what others don’t want – things like ‘problem soils’, dredgings, ‘wastes’. This brick making video was the inspiration for this blog post. It explains how a company in the Philippines uses abundant, locally available materials to make brick. … Read more
Here’s Patti Stouter’s entry for the $300 House design competition. Rubble bags on lower walls provide a solid, flood resistant wall. Hyper-wattle provides lightweight insulating upper walls made of mesh tubes. Thin walls conserve space and materials, and take less labor. Her design is one of only a few in this competition that could actually … Read more
Tim, one of our readers, left a comment about the materials in southern Mexico (60 miles east of Mexico City in the state of Tlaxcala, just outside the state capital) where he’s planning to build an earthbag home. It turns out there’s a wealth of natural building materials nearby that are dirt cheap. In addition … Read more
We’ve been discussing the Eternally Solar earthbag building system at length. Engineering tests show their walls exceed building code requirements even when filled with sand. Their bags are also used to form lintels and bond beams. As exciting and practical as this is, there’s a wide range of other options. Their earthbags can be filled … Read more
Some of the proposed housing solutions in the $300 House competition are utterly soulless and devoid of love. They look like boxes churned out by a factory with little or no thought to cooking, living, sleeping, privacy, windows or other basic necessities. At first I noted their use of energy intensive materials such as steel … Read more
Previous blog posts have explained how earthbag homes are similar to rammed earth (see Ancient Rammed Earth Structures) and compressed earth (see Impact Testing Megablocks with Black Powder Cannon). And in comparison to adobe, which is also quite durable, earthbags gain additional durability from: – Tamping (greater density, less air space, clay platelets bonded together) … Read more