Saturday, April 21, 2007
Mud houses
I find out (from Grand Designs) that not only are maybe a third of the world's buildings build from actual mud, but even many buildings in England are. I could understand it in dry climates, but England? What is keeping the walls together over the decades and centuries? There's no binder in mud... (Apart from straw sometimes, which is also not something I'd have imagined wanting to rely on to keep the roof up.) Anybody wise?
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6 comments:
Aren't you ashamed, slinging mud from inside a glass house?
(Or whatever that darn expression says...)
I think the trick is, the mud has some water-proof covering on the outside. Or both sides. Next to my grandma's house in France is an old ruin, still half standing, that was built from dried mud bricks (how biblical!). Maybe the covering was redone every year to protect the walls.
Well, that's all I know. And, according to Socrates, being aware of it is half of all knowledge.
(Wow, that's great news! I had no idea I was so smart!)
In my home state of New Mexico many houses are made of adobe (clay/mud with straw). The oldest continually inhabited dwelling in North America (all the Americas?) is made of adobe: Taos Pueblo.
ashley said: "In my home state of New Mexico many houses are made of adobe (clay/mud with straw)."
It would be kewl if someone operating a photo printing business built his shop from this material.
Both "mud" (cob) and strawbale are pretty widely used in the green building movement. Cob has been widely used in SW England for centuries - the house in which Sir Walter Raliegh was born is cob and still standing.
Strawbale is more recent - because baling machines are more recent. The technique was started in Nebraska in about the 1890s. Houses which use the strawbale to keep the roof up are still called "Nebraska style". The alternative is a post and beam structure with stawbale infill.
The tricks to preseving strawbale buildings are a good hat and boots - that is, a wider than normal overhang on the roof to keep rainwater away and good protection at the bottom from water wicking up from the ground or rain splashing off the ground or nearby objects.
It is also important that the inside and outside of the walls are coated with appropriately permeable render to allow any moisture which does get into the bales to get out. Lime based plasters are usually used because they are more permeable (and less environmentally destructive) than cement based renders.
Bales are actually quite dense and strong so, once the initial compression has taken place, they will support a roof quite adequately. They are also fairly resistant to low levels of moisture - they're much more like wood than they are like hay, for example.
The big adavantage of strawbale is, of course, that it is cheap enough that very high levels of insulation can be achieved. If I remember correctly, a typical strawbale wall will beat the current building regulation requirements for insulation by about three times.
The most accessible example of strawbale that I know of in the UK is at the Centre for Alternative Technology in West Wales.
Thank you much.
TTL said...
"It would be kewl if someone operating a photo printing business built his shop from this material."
Forget it. Nobody'll ever find a kewl name for THAT! Bankruptcy guaranteed.
"The tricks to preseving strawbale buildings are a good hat and boots"
Dang! I knew this was too good to be true. Does an umbrella and several buckets help, too?
Let me get that mop.
Trust a guy named "Hangar" to know a lot of interesting stuff about construction. Do you know about building airplanes too, or just baling machines? :-)
And there I thought you just had a viking-sounding name.
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