sustainable housing

Interns Wanted for International Aid Work

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Interns help aid organizations build affordable housing
Interns help aid organizations build affordable housing

“Who learns skills for free? Interns who assist aid organizations.
Learn and serve in the US only or here and overseas as well. Build Simple Inc. offers free training in construction and design of geo-textile buildings like earthbag and straw wattle or techniques like Ubuntu-blox that use agricultural waste or plastic trash.

Two weeks of training near Albuquerque, NM is being scheduled for early July, with repeat dates in September. Help BSI to advance building knowledge about alternative techniques while you learn. Builders, photographers, building designers, and service team leaders can all contribute needed skills. Engineers and engineering students are especially needed to test structures- ask about donating a day or getting involved in an ongoing study.

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Sustainable Building Networks

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Rural Knowledge Housing Network in India
Rural Knowledge Housing Network in India

Do you have a sustainable building network in your area? If you do, it will make the process of building with alternative materials much easier. These networks pull together all sorts of key information to guide people through the building process. Here’s an example of a sustainable building network I stumbled across in India called the Rural Housing Knowledge Network (RHKN)

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Laurie Baker: Poor Man’s Architect

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“A biography of inspiring British-origin Indian architect Laurie Baker who pioneered cost-effective energy efficient beautiful and simple architecture in India in mud brick and local materials… after meeting Gandhiji he decided to stay in India and build for the masses.

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Johnny Punish Earthbag Home

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“First, I knew no matter what I did to study how to build such a thing, being a newbie never built a structure kind of guy from New York City, I would make huge mistakes. So instead of getting down and building the main home first, instead I first built a property wall. And boy oh boy, I am glad I did. The team I put together made horrific mistakes…Heck, we lost the wall twice! But I knew that learning curve would beat us up so it was cool. No worries.

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Teams of Three

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Working in teams of three to build earthbag structures is often the most efficient. You could use fewer or more workers per team, but three seems like the most efficient in most cases. Worker #1: Filling buckets, moistening and mixing soil Worker #2: Carrying buckets of soil from worker #1 to worker #3 Worker #3: … Read more

Disaster Resistant Earthbag Housing

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One of the greatest needs in the world is disaster-resistant housing – houses that can hold up against hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, flooding and other natural disasters. If you follow the news like I do then you’ll realize that tragic disasters affecting tens of thousands or millions of people occur almost daily. It’s sad and painful … Read more