Rammed Earth House from AR Awards
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12.11.06
The Architectural Review's Awards for Emerging Architecture has US$ 30,000 in prizes for young architects. We liked a few of the winners and runners-up, including this demonstration by Tokyo's Loco Architects of the possibilities of rammed earth construction. Its been around for thousands of years and usually pretty clunky, (Inhabitat covers a modern version here) but this winner of a Japanese competition is spectacular. It is a "concept house which aims to impinge as little as possible on the environment. When the house becomes redundant, its rammed earth walls can simply be demolished and returned to the ground. " ::AR Awards for Emerging Architecture
"The material to construct the house is generated by site excavation and preparation. A series of tightly packed earth walls define and enclose a loose arrangement of interconnected spaces. The tapering profiles of the walls form a new topography, as if the land has been cut and fashioned by forces of nature. In reality, an array of rollers, rammers and concrete mixers were used to make and shape the walls. Raw steel sheets, more commonly used for providing grip for trucks on construction sites, were employed as a roofing material.
The outcome is delightfully primitive, like an archaeological excavation revealing ancient burial mounds, and it would take some effort for it to be properly habitable. "
More on rammed earth and similar topics, please!
This is a great alternative material that needs to go mainstream, espeically in areas like the southwest US. Honest, beautiful, cheap, and very green.
Also a potential owner built material. Architects like Bill Joy have done beautiful homes with this stuff.
The architect you are referring to is Rick Joy, and yes - his work with Rammed Earth is amazing.
My question is: I think unless rammed earth is constructed using the traditional method of damping by hand, don't you need to add some sort of structural stabilizer, be it cement or rebar? If so, you really wouldn't be able to just "return it to the earth" when the useful life is over.
That being said, I think rammed earth and PISE over straw bale is completely underutilized in climates where it is most appropriate, like the American southwest. Though I have worked on projects which employed both methods successfully in Northern California, which is an equally suitable place to build with these methods.
The rammed earth structures of Morocco are fantastic. Here is a link about it in India.
http://www.arriyadh.com/Researches/-------1-2.pdf
With modern earthquake resistant research, rammed eath should be one of the main forms of building. This along with straw-clay (leichtlehm) for insulation most of the toxic materials in building would be eliminated.
Learn more about architecture made of dirt at http://www.eartharchitecture.org
Rammed earth, and many other earthen technologies require no cement or rebar and are the oldest extant buildings on the planet. The practice of adding "stabilizers" such as cement or emulsified asphalt is a modern corruption of a well-proven building technology in attempts to introduce it to a cash and industrialized economy.
For the latest developments on Modern Rammed Earth you really need to check out SIREwall. www.sirewall.com
A very informative site and if you love rammed earth or the idea of building with it then you really need to check it out. It also shows that rammed earth is not only for 'suitable' climates since these projects are all built in Canada with high success.