Rammed Earth Homebuilding

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COUNTRY SKILLS

Finished rammed earth homes have the same components (foundations, walls, doors) as any other building. The difference is mass, and plenty of it. With 18-inch to 24-inch-thick walls, rammed earth homes create a level of strength and comfort that can't be duplicated with wood-frame construction. Typically the walls are formed in long horizontal sections, but the wooden forms holding the compacted earth can be modified to build them one small panel at a time. The gap between panels will be filled by a poured concrete post.

Why is the world's oldest form of human shelter malting a comeback? For a start, it's beautiful, inexpensive, durable, highly insulating, and it's raw materials are all around you.

There is a certain magic to living in buildings with thick earth walls. It's hard to describe, but easy to notice. Just take a step inside one on some warm summer day and you'll feel it immediately. It's cool, of course—everyone knows adobe houses are "warm in winter and cool in summer"—but there's something else, too, a little harder to put your finger on. It's quiet and feels somehow incredibly solid and sturdy ...very different from other houses.

Most Americans today have grown up with the idea that a house is a lightweight box with walls built of thin sticks covered on both sides with even thinner skins. The floors and roofs are also built of sticks with equally thin skins. In the past two decades, as our awareness of the value of energy conservation has increased, builders have begun to fill the spaces between the sticks with expanded petroleum-based fibers, but that insulation hasn't done much to eliminate the flimsy nature of the building.

After all, not that long ago, houses used to be built to last for generations. People actually lived in a house long enough to think of it as home. People died in the same house they were born in. Times have changed of course, and in our fast-paced world few of us expect to die in the same city we were born in, let alone the same house. That doesn't mean, however, that we can't still appreciate the special qualities of a house built solidly enough to last for several hundred years.

In the mid-1970s, while searching the Reader's Guide to Periodic Literature for more technical information on adobe construction, I came across a few current references to an alternate earthbuilding method known as "rammed earth:' Further research led to the discovery of a multitude of 30- and 40-year-old references. As it turned out, the rammed earth technique had enjoyed widespread popularity during the first half of the twentieth century. The construction process I read about—moist soil compacted directly into movable formwork yielding immediately loadsupporting walls—seemed almost too simple to be true. No sticky mud, no waiting for the bricks to dry, no mortar to mix, and no bricks to lay—it was an industrial engineer's dream. One-fifth the water, one-quarter the mixing time, onesixtieth the drying time. Could this possibly be? If this technique had all these things going for it, why wasn't it in widespread use?