“64-year-old architect Octavio Mendoza literally baked the house that he lives in. He calls the 5,400 square foot house ‘the biggest piece of pottery in the world’. Casa Terracotta, or Casa Barro in Spanish, was built exclusively by hand using clay and baked in the sun. Located in Villa de Leyva, a colonial mountain village in Colombia, it is also known to locals as the ‘Casa de Flintstone’ or Flintstone House.
clay
Adjusting the Clay/Aggregate Ratio of Road Base
All of our earthbag projects have been built using the same road base material. It has worked exceedingly well. After tamping, the earthbags are solid and turn into very hard earthen blocks. Here I am testing the hardness of bags on our roundhouse. But from time to time I would see areas with less than … Read more
Vetiver and Rice Hull/Clay
If you’ve been watching our videos, you’ve seen us making various earthen blocks. This one here is the best one so far. It has clay and rice hulls. Another very good block was the clay with vetiver grass. So I had the idea to combine the best – the rice hulls and the vetiver. That’s … Read more
Road Base: My #1 Choice for Bag Fill Material
Road base is a mixture of clay and gravel used in road building throughout the world. As an engineered material designed to withstand extreme loads (trucks and cars), you are assured of good working properties for earthbag building. While site based soils are less expensive and require less transport, the working properties are unknown and … Read more