“LiveRoof® combines the best features of all green roof systems:
• Natural Function/ Natural Beauty of built-in-place systems
• Speed of installation of modules
• Prevegetation of carpet systems
• Plant diversity of 65mm – 150mm of soil.
green building
Building Green: A Complete How-To Guide to Alternative Building Methods
Earth Plaster * Straw Bale * Cordwood * Cob * Living Roofs
“Clarke Snell and Timothy L. Callahan, whose popular Good House Book helped environmentally-minded readers create an earth-friendly home, have returned with a photo-packed, amazingly complete, start-to-finish guide to “green” housebuilding.
Natural Design/Build Materials & Methods
“Round Timberframing. Harvesting trees from the site where we are building and using the trees as round structural members is ideal. Certainly this is time and labor intensive, although structurally, round timbers outperform milled timbers of the same dimension. This is because of the natural spiral form of the tree grain which is lost when the tree is milled. This spiral form is what allows tree branches of large girth to hang horizontally to limits that seem unbelievable.
Wiki Natural House Foundation Design
Yesterday’s blog post was about the foam glass insulation we plan to use on the Wiki Natural House. Today we’re giving a sneak peak (first draft) of the foundation design. The primary design considerations are low cost, owner-builder friendly, minimal cement, must withstand cold and wet climate (insulation is key), must align with thick straw bale walls and meet UK building codes. That’s a pretty tall order. Many of my designs are for rural areas with few or no codes. In this case, we have to put a little more effort into workable solutions.
Foamglas Blocks, Gravel and Insulation Board
We’re starting work on the Wiki Natural House project in the UK. At this point it looks like we will use three foam glass products: foam glass blocks, foam glass insulation board under the slab floor and foam glass gravel in the tires. This plus the straw bale walls plus R-40 roof insulation and good windows will give us a superinsulated house.
Puddled Adobe
We reported on their adobe retreat center yesterday. Now New Life Foundation is building puddled adobe housing at their center in Chiang Rai, Thailand. This type of construction receives very little attention even though it’s one of the simplest, lowest cost building methods and has been around thousands of years. It’s believed the oldest house in the US — pre-Spanish — was built with puddled adobe. Among other things, puddled adobe would make good interior walls with adequate framing at doors.