While I make my living as a web designer my education and training is as a potter… which has given me a particularly close bond to… well… dirt. Construction techniques like adobe, rammed earth, cob, and earthbag are really beginning to appeal to me more and more. There’s something about building a home from the earth on the building site that just seems smart, cheap too!
I stumbled on this humanitarian earthbag eco-village project in Uganda on the Earthbag Building Blog the other day and wanted to share it with you. You can also read about the project in much more detail at EarthbagBuilding.com. The design came out of a collaboration between the local people and a team made up of people from Japanese universities.
Photo credit to Sunny Tsai and the folks behind this Ecovillage in the East African Community.
After watching the wildfires burning down houses in California, I can’t help but to wonder why more people don’t build their houses out of earth, rock, concrete, etc. But it seems like they just don’t learn their lesson and continue rebuilding using wood. And the cycle continues again next year.
The smart old timers in Texas used to build their houses out of rock with tin roofs because of the yearly prarie fires that would come through.
I like this very much because it looks like a way to combat the tropical heat. However to do this it is probably dark inside and what about air movement. Is that a problem? I am enquiring for a friend who has married a Ugandan man and is planning to build a house on farmland.
Would appreciate feedback.
Thanks
These seem to encourage village life, I think that’s a good thing.