Building with Earth: Design and Technology of a Sustainable Architecture

portation and stacking). In India, one person can produce as many as 500 blocks per day using a double mould designed for a smal ...

The disadvantage is that the blocks are usually stabilised with a 4% to 8% cement content in order to endow them with suffi- cie ...

the prices quoted are sometimes more than those for ordinary fired bricks. With simpler production processes and open-air drying ...

If the blocks are dipped in water for a short time to make the surface soft and pliable, it becomes possible to build walls from ...

Fixing fasteners to walls Nails can be driven into an earth block walls more easily than into those constructed of baked bricks. ...

Special acoustic green bricks In order to optimise the acoustic behaviour of domed rooms, a special loam brick with rounded corn ...

With monolithic rammed earth walls, or even with small-sized brick masonry, man- power is high and drying time can delay constru ...

internal walls, or to increase the thermal insulation of exterior walls from the outside. Cavities reduce weight and increase th ...

Floor tiles Prefabricated tiles made with stabilised earth can be used for flooring. One advan- tage is that since they are alre ...

Unlike other building materials, wet loam has the capacity to be formed into any shape. It therefore presents a creative chal- l ...

a compound built using a similar primitive technique. In northwest Ghana, 40-cm-thick walls have been constructed with wet loam ...

Cockington (Devon, England) that was built using this technique in 1410. A similar technique called Wellerbau, has been known in ...

The stranglehmtechnique At the Building Research Laboratory (BRL) a new wet loam technique, termed the stranglehm(“loam strand”) ...

Preparing the mix Tests with 30 different mixtures, including some containing straw, sawdust and pine needles, showed that shrin ...

Illustrations 8.19, 8.20, 8.21and 8.22show the production, transport and laying of these elements. The walls of this project are ...

78 Direct forming 8.26Finished interior wall made of extruded loam profiles 8.27Finished strang- lehm walls, residence, Uchte, G ...

Wall types Due to shrinkage of 3% to 5%, long ele- ments are not recommended. Illustration 8.28shows several possibilities for i ...

Plastic loam has been used for thousands of years to fill gaps in log houses where the logs are laid horizontally, as well as in ...

mixtures. The main problem with all of these techniques has been the common occur- rence of shrinkage cracks. The German archite ...

onto the centre of a cross made of two bundles of straw. The ends of the bundles are then lifted up around the loam, which forme ...