Green Home Building and Sustainable Architecture: April 2010

Green Home Building and Sustainable Architecture

Sustainable architecture is an exciting and important field, with many people reviving traditional methods of building and others creating innovations to established practices. Kelly Hart, webmaster of the popular website www.greenhomebuilding.com, posts text and photos featuring what he discovers from around the world.

About Me

Name: Kelly Hart

Location: Crestone, Colorado, United States

Kelly Hart has been involved with green building concepts for much of his life. He has also worked in various fields of communication media, including still photography, cinematography, animation, video production and now website development. Kelly has lived in an earthbag/papercrete home that he built (but is now mostly living in Mexico) and consults about sustainable building design.

April 09, 2010

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://blog.greenhomebuilding.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://blog.greenhomebuilding.com/feeds/posts/default.

April 02, 2010

Earthbag Structures for Disaster-Prone Areas

Ever since the earthquake in Haiti we have been inundated with requests for information about using earthbags for reconstruction efforts. Owen Geiger and I have joined with Patti Stouter to assemble a coherent response to this need that is based on our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of earthbag building, coupled with some knowledge of the cultural factors involved.

What has evolved is a body of information that is readily available to anyone with internet access, and can be found at www.earthbagstructures.com…a new website created just for this purpose. What you will find there are basic tutorials for building, details about how to go about choosing appropriate plans, a discussion of the cultural factors that should influence your decisions (especially for Haiti), some basic plans for emergency shelters and for more permanent housing (and some that can transition from one to the other), structural details, profiles of actual projects with pictures, a discussion of the costs involved, a listing of resources available and where training might be found, plus some technical data about testing that has been done with earthbags.

In addition to this we have created a private discussion forum for those who are directly involved and want to network with others, and there is information about how to join this.

Each page has a Translate Button at the top where you can choose from dozens of languages with which to read the page, including Haitian Creole.

We feel that this will be a valuable resource for anyone wanting to assist people in need of shelter around the world, especially in disaster-prone regions. We expect that this website will be expanding considerably over time, as we develop more plans, construction details, and can profile more projects.