Freeform earthbag between boulders
“This rather luxurious “cave” artfully combines granite, wood and earth. It has a 70 sqm ground floor divided into three rooms on 3 levels, topped by a 20 sqm loft. While the earthbag walls elegantly fill gaps between large boulders, the double roof structure is elliptic in shape and rests on two Sandalwood poles which previously served as main masts on a sailing boat. Corners are entirely absent, and a feeling of peace and tranquility prevails.”
“It’s finally happening. My little cabin construction project is finally happening. The main building material is earthbag, sometimes called superadobe. Watch this site for our progress! Note that most recent posts are at the top, so chronological order of the blog starts at the bottom!”
Baza Ulmu permaculture centre from Resilience Images on Vimeo.
“Video documentation of Wwoofing experience the county of Maramuresh, Romania. We travellled to Romania in the summer of 2013. Thanks to the wwoofing website wwoof.ro (willing workers on organic farms) we were able to visit one of the first earthbag building sites in the country.
“Across the hill from my cabin live Larry and Lea Van Arsdale. They are building a BIG earthbag house thirty feet in diameter and thirty feet high! They started a year ago and are still working on it, but they’ve been living in it since last fall. So far it’s two stories high and they plan on building the third story next summer. Right now they are scrambling to “cobb” the rest of the exterior before winter. That means applying the cob, (earth plaster) or adobe, to the bags which make up the wall.
“As a little girl, and a young woman, I always dreamed of building my own house someday but I never had a specific desire for it. I knew that the right house would come along at the right time and with the right partner, and we’d build something that fit our needs, together.
Domes evolved in deserts, so we recommend extra protection for snowy/wet climates. There are two main approaches: 1. Build a roofed dome. Search our Projects pages at Earthbag Building.com to see several examples. 2. Build a ferrocement rainscreen on the exterior of the dome. The rainscreen is basically an outer cement shell that’s built on top of the dome with about 1″ space between that allows any water that gets through to escape.