Rammed earth farm house - Structure

The structure

I started construction of my house in the farm (farm house) this year (2017-2018). Building will use eco-friendly materials - rammed earth walls and Mangalore tile roof. As famous Indian mud architect Laurie Baker says, house should go back to the earth after we stop living in them (rather ... after we stop maintaining them). Today's fancy concrete buildings remain on earth for thousands of years after people stop living in them. Nature cannot destroy and recycle concrete. Concrete buildings will stand for ever like ghost structures. Unlike the concrete buildings, soil buildings will go back to earth if people stop maintaining them. Almost all the parts of the building (mainly walls and roofing) will weather and go into the soil in few decades if the building is abandoned. Also, another very important feature of soil buildings is - they use very little energy and resources when compared to concrete monsters.

Therefore my home is going to be a soil structure. Different techniques like cob, adobe, rammed earth, and stabilized earth blocks can be used for building soil structure. I decided to use rammed earth because of some advantages with rammed earth. More about advantages of rammed earth will be provided in a future blog article.

Apart from lot of information available on the internet, good reference books for rammed earth structures are:

1. Adobe and Rammed Earth Buildings. Design and Construction. - Paul Graham McHenry, Jr.

 

 2. Rammed Earth Structures, A Code of Practice. - Julian Keable and Rowland Keable

"Keable & Keable" book is the bible of rammed earth. This book is the standard for rammed earth buildings in Zimbabwe (and other African countries I believe). This is expensive book (more you feel so when you see the thickness of the book), but very well worth the price tag because it covers minutest subject areas of rammed earth technique.

By the way - fact that I am a qualified structural engineer helped a lot. My engineering background made it easy to understand the technical terms and techniques mentioned in the books, reference materials, and WWW.

Also, I was the engineer, designer, and contractor for the project. I used Google SketchUp for 3D layout of the building. Basic version is free for personal use. Only catch is - for the reason best known to Google, it is available only for Windows and Mac (no luck Linux users like me). I had to struggle a lot to run it under Wine. Under Linux/Wine it crashes few times in a day. I had to bear it because I don't want to pay for Windows OS or buy a Mac just for using SketchUp.

Foundation trench outlines.

I printed SketchUp drawing layout on paper for the use of building workers. I then used 2 ft long 10mm steel bar (rebar) pieces as stakes to mark the center line on the ground. 18 inch wide foundation trench outlines were marked with lime powder. Stakes and string line tied to the stakes for marking the layout are visible in the picture (click to view full size). Blue/yellow plastic sheets are for covering soil procured for rammed earth walls. White pile of stone pieces on the remote corner is for laying concrete bed for the foundation.

Rammed earth farm house - Intro

Low foot print living

This year (2017-2018) I started construction of my farm house. Laterite stone blocks, portland cement and reinforced cement concrete (RCC) are popular building materials in this place now. All of them are playing havoc with the environment in different ways.

However, the picture was different few decades back. Traveling in the villages shows us the true picture of how the people built their homes. People were using locally available natural building materials. Buildings older than few decades are either cob or sun dried mud blocks (adobe bricks) with thatched roof or Mangalore tile (clay roofing tile) roof.

I am deeply committed to eco-friendly and sustainable life style. Therefore I wanted to build my home with locally available natural materials. I decided to make it a rammed earth structure. Load bearing rammed earth walls and clay roofing using Mangalore roofing tiles.

As famous Indian mud architect Laurie Baker says, house should go back to the earth after we stop living in them (meaning - after we stop maintaining them). Today's modern and fancy concrete buildings remain on earth for thousands of years after people stop living in them. Nature cannot easily destroy and recycle concrete. Unlike the concrete buildings, soil buildings will go back to earth if people stop maintaining them. Almost all the parts of the building will weather and go into the soil in few decades once the building is abandoned.

One important feature of soil buildings is - they use very little embodied energy and resources when compared to conventional structures (like wood, stone, or concrete). Bulk of the material used for the building (which is soil) is taken from the site or transported from nearby area if the soil in the site is not suitable for construction. Compared to this, a conventional structure fetches building material from distant quarries/forests causing large scale environmental destruction in the process and burns precious fossil fuel for transportation adding to the ecological destruction.

Thanks to my farm helpers, lot of heavy physical work has gone into the building. This is how the building looks now. It is not yet complete. I have lot of work to do. I will explain each part of the building in the coming days in a series of articles.

Rammed earth building under construction.