Earthbag Construction
(Page 5 of 5)
October/November 2005
By Kaki Hunter and Donald Kiffmeyer
Earthbags act as the form for the earth, and because they stay within the walls, earthbag construction eliminates the need for heavy-duty wood and steel forms that are not user-friendly for the first-time owner/builder.
RELATED CONTENT
The Healthy Building Network’s Pharos Project aims to tap the collective knowledge of green buildin...
You can add an artistic touch to your cordwood construction walls with the inclusion of colored bot...
Build a house or other building using chunks of firewood and masonry to construct the walls....
The "stackwall" or "cordwood" or "stovewood" method of construction has been around a long, long ti...
Cob is the traditional English term for a style of earth building. It is particularly useful in wet climates where the drying of adobe is difficult. England and Wales have cob structures that have been in use for nearly five centuries.
Cob uses a combination of clay, sand, straw and water to create stiff bread-loaf-shaped “cobs” that are plopped in place on the wall and “knitted” into each other to create a consolidated mass. Like earthbags, cob can be formed into curvilinear shapes. Unlike earthbags, cob requires the use of straw. The straw works for cob in the same way that steel reinforcement does for concrete.
While the tensile strength of earthbags creates a sturdy “brick,” cob requires a certain amount of time to set up before it can be built upon. As a cob wall grows in height, the weight of the overlying cobs can deform the lower courses of cob if they are still wet. The amount of cob that can be built up in one session without deforming is known as a “lift.” Each lift must be allowed time to dry a little before the next lift is added to avoid this bulging deformation.
Pressed block is a relatively recent type of earthen construction. It is essentially the marriage of adobe and rammed earth. Using an optimum rammed-earth mix of clay and sand, the moistened soil is compressed into a brick shape by a machine that can be either manual or automated.
The main advantage of earthbag building over pressed-block construction is the same as that over all other earth-building forms — earthbags do not require a specific soil mixture to work properly. Adobe, rammed earth, cob and pressed block rely on a prescribed ratio of clay and sand; or clay, sand and straw.
—Kaki Hunter and Donald Kiffmeyer
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |
