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| Earthbag Building with earthbags (sometimes called sandbags) is both old and new. Sandbags have long been used, particularly by the military for creating strong, protective barriers, or for flood control. The same reasons that make them useful for these applications carry over to creating housing: the walls are massive and substantial, they resist all kinds of severe weather (or even bullets and bombs), and they can be erected simply and quickly with readily available components. Burlap bags were traditionally used for this purpose, and they work fine until they eventually rot. Newer polypropylene bags have superior strength and durability, as long as they are kept away from too much sunlight. For permanent housing the bags should be covered with some kind of plaster for protection. There has been a resurgence of interest in earthbag building since architect Nader Khalili, of the Cal-Earth Institute, began experimenting with bags of adobe soil as building blocks for creating domes, vaults and arches. Khalili was familiar with Middle Eastern architecture and the use of adobe bricks in building these forms, so it was natural for him to imagine building in this way. The Cal-Earth Institute has been training people with his particular techniques, and now the whole field has expanded considerably with further experimentation by his students and others. I have taken Khalili's ideas of building with earthbags that are laid in courses with barbed wire between them, and come up with some hybrid concepts that have proven to make viable housing. Instead of filling the bags with adobe soil, I have used crushed volcanic rock. This creates a very well insulated wall (about as good as strawbale) that will never rot or be damaged by moisture. As a covering for the earthbags I used papercrete (see the papercrete page). This seems to be a very good solution to the need to seal the bags from the sun and the weather, without necessarily creating a vapor barrier...the walls remain breathable. Papercrete may not be a good choice in warm and humid climates, because mold could form on it. Also, I expect the papercrete finish to be fairly maintenance free, unlike an adobe finish that would require regular maintenance.
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RESOURCES ARTICLES: Building with Unbonded Pumice Photogallery & Description of Our House Construction Details of Our House Filling the Bags with Rice Hulls EXPERT
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Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag/Papercrete House 1 1/2 hr. DVD produced by Kelly Hart.We wanted to build an environmentally sensitive and aesthetically pleasing home at a moderate price. We chose to create earthbag domes covered with papercrete (recycled paper combined with cement and sand). This honest DVD documents details of the construction, insights gained, and the ups and downs (literally!) of the building process. Several other earthbag homes are also shown. For more information about the house see Photogallery & Description of Our House or Construction Details of Our House . To view a streaming video intoduction to this DVD click here.
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Building with Earth: A Guide to Flexible-Form Earthbag Construction by Paulina Wojciechowska, 2001. This is the first book published about earthbag building, and still one of the best. Unfortunately it has gone out of print, but is still available used from various sellers at Amazon. My earthbag/papercrete house is featured on the cover, and as a case study, and images of it are sprinkled throughout the text. Paulina visited me while I was building it and helped with the construction some. She studied with Nader Khalili at CalEarth, so is grounded in his training, but is not bound by his perspective. This book touches on most of the relevant facits of earthbag building, and I give it a high recommendation. |
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Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own by Nader Khalili, 1996. This book shows how to build vaults, domes and arches with adobe blocks. It then goes on to suggest how to actually fire the structure like pottery, with a glaze. It is a fiscinating concept that has seen little use, partly because the firing process can be rather polluting. This book has been updated to discuss the SuperAdobe building method of building with earthbags.. I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in alternative building methods.
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The House That Jill Built: A Woman's Guide to Home Building by Judy Ostrow and Karen Leffler, 2005.
Millions of women are already learning the basics of do-it-yourself and getting in tune with the empowering nature of power tools. Allison Kennedy, a woman who built an earthbag house all by herself after her boyfriend left her with a concrete foundation, is one of the featured stories. The House That Jill Built is perfect for women of all skill levels, from the experienced do-it-her-selfer to the woman who doesn't know the difference between a stud finder and a palm sander, to the woman who is looking to move on to more complex or large-scale projects. Sharing women's real-life experiences in creating their own dream homes, The House that Jill Built is a groundbreaking guide to the process as well as a collection of women's real-life home-building experiences, complete with before and after photos and drawings, advice from experts, safety precautions, and a comprehensive section of how-to tips, including a tool guide. Chapters highlight success stories, such as the design and construction of one woman's desert dream house to another's tropical paradise nestled up north. After reading these personal stories, every woman will feel motivated to pick up the hammer and go for it.
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For more information about this plan, and many others, visit our sister site www.dreamgreenhomes.com, where you will find a wide range of plans for sustainable homes, greenhouses, small buildings, garages, and food storage space for sale. Dream Green Homes is a consortium of outstanding architects and designers, who have pooled their talent and expertise for your benefit. |
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ASPECTS OF SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE GENERAL DESIGN There is no concrete foundation; the house rests on a pad of scoria laid directly over the natural sand. Successive courses of polypropylene bags filled with sand (on the bottom few courses), and scoria (on the rest of the courses) are piled in an overlapping (brick-like) fashion to form the domes. Between each course are two strands of 4-point barbed wire. Each section of the house has a loft framed with conventional lumber. Some of the domes have poles arranged on the second story to help support the shape of the dome. The earthbags are covered initially, both inside and out, with papercrete (recycled paper, with a small amount of Portland cement). The final layer is either a lime plaster (lime, silica sand and white Portland cement), or papercrete with sand added. In some cases the final coat of papercrete has been stained with latex paint thinned way down with water. All of the walls and roof areas remain breathable (except the central metal roof under the solar equipment). Floors are poured adobe, flagstone, tile, papercrete, wood. (This house was built in a county that has not adopted the Uniform Building Code. The usual plumbing and electrical codes were required, and inspected for.) HEATING COOLING VENTING RECYCLED MATERIALS NEW MATERIALS NUMBER OF BAGS USED SQUARE FOOTAGE Approximately 3 years of owner/builder time at about 30 hours a week. No hired labor. Occasional friends' help. R-VALUE OF THE WALLS ELECTRICITY HOT WATER GREENHOUSE CONSTRUCTION COSTS:
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I was recently given the opportunity to help demolish an earthbag house project that had been started in our community. The owner/builder had sold the property and the new owner wanted the land cleared. At first the owner wanted to have heavy excavation equipment come in and just push it all over and haul the debris away. I offered to help carefully take the structure apart so we could recycle some of the materials and learn something about how easy it might be to tear down such construction. There were three domes to be removed, two of them connected and the third freestanding. These domes were constructed similarly to my house: polypropylene earthbags were filled with crushed volcanic rock (scoria); the courses of bags had barbed wire between them and the bags were tied to each other with poly baling twine. Papercrete was applied to both the interior and exterior surfaces. Additionally, rebar stakes had been driven through several courses of bags in many locations.
The freestanding dome was a rather lacy affair, almost a gazebo, with four arched openings and several circular windows. The builder had experienced difficulty in erecting this delicate building (it had collapsed several times in the process), so at my suggestion he had wrapped the columns between the arches with two-inch chicken wire mesh before applying the papercrete, in order to stiffen the building and make it stronger. This gazebo-like dome was built on a layer of about ten inches of scoria, which I started to collect for reuse. As I was digging around the base of the structure, it occurred to me that an interesting experiment would be to dig out from under a section of the wall and see how much could be undercut before the wall began to collapse. The section of wall I chose to undermine was about 15 feet long, between two arched openings. I dug alternately from one side and then the other, completely removing the scoria from underneath the wall. Like my house, there was no other foundation to this building.
I dashed home to get a camera to record the events, and continued undermining the wall, being careful to keep out of harm's way if it should suddenly collapse. The more I dug the more amazed I became. When the wall section was precariously balanced on about one foot of scoria in the middle of the wall, and nothing had happened except one bag had fallen out onto the ground below, I snapped the picture that can be seen here.
If anyone had any doubts about the strength and integrity of this system of building, this experiment should allay those concerns. Earthbag building of this sort can be STRONG! Eventually, as I continued to dig out from under the wall, it simply began to hinge downward from a point about ten feet up, above the arches. The wall itself showed no signs of falling apart. In fact when the owner tried to break it apart with an axe and a sledge hammer, he finally gave up and decided to have the backhoe tear into it! The fact that it was surrounded with the wire mesh and that he had used twice the amount of Portland cement as usual in the papercrete mix are factors contributing to the phenomenal strength.
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My challenge was to imagine a project where people from such diverse backgrounds could cooperate in building something that would require little specialized skill and could be accomplished over the course of just a few days. The place where part of this conference was to be held was a large parcel of mostly undeveloped land known as Atalanta. A tent structure would provide shade for some of the events, while others would occur under the Cottonwood trees along a small creek. I chose a site right at the base of a lovely symmetrical hill to build what we decided to call the "Glorieta," which means an arbor or shade structure in Spanish. Our Glorieta would be a sort of glorified gazebo that would emerge directly from the soil beneath our feet. Since the conference was about sustainability, I felt it wasimportant to honor this by using local materials as much as possible. With my experience in building with earthbags (recycled misprinted polypropylene rice bags), I knew that it was possible to fill these bags with the fine sand that the entire hill was composed of, and create an actual building. As long as the bags of sand were stacked vertically, rather than inclined as for a dome, the structure should be plenty stable. Part of my plan was to terrace the hill in such a way that the soil removed in the excavation would be used to fill the bags. This terracing would then create a natural amphitheater, with the Glorieta serving as a sort of stage area for performances. To accentuate this function, the Glorieta has buttress wings that open out toward the amphitheater and an opening wide enough to accommodate a small musical ensemble that would be in full view of an audience.
At any given time there were about a dozen people working on the project, and this was only for about three hours each morning, for a total of five days. One of the bigger challenges was to coordinate this many people to work smoothly as a team. I divided up the tasks so that some cleared weeds and brush, while others dug sand and filled bags, cut wire or twine (to hold the eventual chicken wire for the stucco), placed the bags and tamped them flat. It was a very industrious group effort, and it was amazing to see the structure actually rise out of the dust! It became apparent after a couple of days work that the Glorieta was not going to be complete by the end of our allotted time. We actually did get all of the bag walls erected, but did not finish the roof nor get much of the stucco up. This stucco was made from the same onsite sand, mixed with some Portland cement. Only one of the earthbag benches that serve as retaining walls for the terraces was created. I thought that we would need to dig much more soil than this to fill all of the bags. While most of the effort of building the Glorieta was very hard work, there was also an atmosphere of much joking, singing, and chatting. Lots of fun was generated by many successful attempts at walking across the horizontal beam suspended about seven feet above the ground at the main entrance to the Glorieta.
The Glorieta project was only one of many facets of this conference, but several people told me that for them it was a high point. Physically creating a functional and aesthetically interesting structure out of little more than the dirt under your feet and a few small dead trees is a memory that these folks will keep for some time. |
Filling the Bags with Rice Hulls
Don Stephens has been experimenting with rice hulls in bags. He says, "I thought you might find this photo of interest...it's the bag-walled studio I'm mentoring/assisting the owners in building here in Spokane. The bags are just filled with packed, dry rice hulls and they are load-bearing, holding up the insulated bondbeam at the top and the poured-in-ricehull-insulated roof, which will end up planted, over its salvaged-carpet covered Mel-Rol waterproofing. There's been no settlement since construction and it feels SOLID, walking on the roof. The exterior will be stuccoed with slightly-stabilized cob and the interior will be earth plastered. The subfloor is of ricehull-liteclay, for insulation, and will be topped with cob-adobe.... : ) " There is more information about various tests that have been performed with rice hulls as insulation at www.esrla.com/shotgun , slides 24-39. Also the issue #47 (Fall 2004) of The Last Straw has a lengthy article. Also, the complete text of Paul Oliver's article about the Rice Hull House is available here. If any one is interested, my company supplied the hulls for Don Stephens project. Contact jpereiraATrice-hulls.com. |
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earthbagbuilding.com is absolutlely the most informative site about earthbag building, created by Kelly Hart and Dr. Owen Geiger. karacadir A couple conduct regular workshops in sustainable building with earthbags in San Migel de Allende, Mexico. naturalhomes.org lists workshops from around the world that relate to earthbags. calearth.org Nader Khalili's earthbag works. okokok.org Kaki Hunter and Donald Kiffmeyer, the authors of Earthbag Building, have assembled a very informative site that is mostly about earthbag building. earthlodge shows the evolution of an earthbag building project. earthhandsandhouses.org the construction of Paulina Wojciekowska's earthbag dome project in Poland. is shown under projects/sandbags... caicosdream show Doni Kiffmeyer and Kaki Hunter working on an earthbag project. midpines.us a series of construction photos with captions about building an earthbag home in the Sierras of California. icbo code central article outlining the chronology and results of testing done on Nader Khalili's superadobe system of building. calearth.org/Emerg This two-page PDF file outlines Nader Khalili's approach to building an emergency shelter. sarpy.com a list of vendors of poly and burlap earthbags. donalddavisbags.com another supplier of bags. archearth.com pictures and description of an earthbag "Sound Temple" in Thailand. nzdl.sadl.uleth.ca The basics of building with arches, vaults and cupolas |
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The basic structure is earthbags, with the vertical walls composed of
two columns of earthbags, tied together with wire. The inner bags would
be filled with local soil from the site, providing considerable thermal
mass. The outer column of bags, including those for the roof, would be
filled with an insulating material, such as crushed volcanic rock or perlite.
A natural tree with several uplifted branches holds a steel hoop aloft,
which in turn supports both the dome skylight and the many poles that
radiate out from the center as rafters. The bags would be plastered both
inside and out with stabalized earthen plaster, papercrete or stucco,
leaving the natural rafter poles exposed on the inside. Some of the interior
walls would be natural stones for their beauty and thermal mass. The floor
could be adobe, flagstone, bricks or pavers for durability and more thermal
mass. This structure would require minimal foundation work, since a rubble
trench foundation down to the frost level is all that is required (no
cement).
I accepted a wonderful challenge when I was asked to facilitate the creation of some sort of monument with about thirty people attending the Second Vittachi International Youth Gathering, held in Crestone, Colorado in early August of 2003. The expected attendees were from all over the world: the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, China, Canada, Niger, Lebanon, South Africa, Cambodia, Indonesia, Cameroon, Poland, Jordan, New Zealand, Australia, UK, Brazil, and the USA. Unfortunately, not all of these countries were represented because of problems in getting visas from the U.S. government.
Another function of the Glorieta is to provide a shady place to socialize, convene classes or workshops, or simply be contemplative. For this reason I designed built-in benches both inside and outside the circular structure. The shade would come from a conical roof framed with small cottonwood trees that had died from last year's drought, and even smaller branches that would be woven around these rafters. This roof structure would be self-supporting, with the small ends of the trees wired to a central steel hoop, and the larger ends pinned to the earthbag wall with lengths of steel rebar. Barbed wire embedded between each course of bags serves to keep the circular wall from expansion from the outward force of the rafters.
Towards the end of our time there was a satisfying moment when all the participants had an opportunity to embed a rock, shell or other personal item brought from their country for this purpose. This will be a permanent memento of the wonderful event that spawned the Glorieta. Another moment that generated some excitement was when we removed the wooden arch form to reveal the self-supporting earthbag arch over the back entrance to the space; this always seems like gravity-defying magic.
