Compressed Earth Blocks: Why and How, Here and There

what if there was construction technology that was fireproof soundproof bug proof bulletproof breathable mold proof non-toxic regulated humidity without fans wires and switches regulated temperature was very low cost to run your building ultra low maintenance structurally sound earthquake resistant it's built well hurricane and tornado resistant ultra low embodied energy thousand-year durability recyclable locally available and it's available worldwide would you be interested in a building product like that this is it right here compressed earth block we've got a bunch of them up here you can come up and grab them and poke them afterwards we make several different sizes 6 by 12 7 by 14 10 by 14s sustainability is a key word for all of us I think in this room one that's been used a lot lately this particular definition was created by the United Nations Brundtland report in 1987 and I think it's a pretty good one it's pretty sick synced States the case pretty clearly sustainable development is that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs pretty good but not really good enough here's kind of the steps that we've gone through those of us in the green building movement we had business as usual we all I think know what that is and it's it's destroying the planet basically and so we realized we have to do something about it so we decided we would become green that was the hot buzzword to start we're gonna be green well that word has been co-opted by so many products that aren't you know we have styrofoam blocks filled with cement and concrete and steel you know and that's a green block well it's not a green block you know that's an incredibly high embodied energy product so it's been co-opted by so many non environmental materials that we've abandoned it completely in our world and then we went to sustainable the definition we just saw which is admirable we should try to not damage the planet but we've damaged it so badly already that again that's not good enough so we have to go to the next step which is restorative we need to start putting it back but that's not even good enough because we've done so much damage already that we don't have enough time to put it back so we need to go to the final step which is regenerative we need to develop a way to live so that we're enhancing the relationship with the earth and what we plant or what we build we'll be there in a environmental friendly way and regenerating the planet that's our goal people have been building out of earth for millennia that's probably most of you know this is the Pueblo Santos New Mexico they hold the title of the oldest continually occupied buildings in North America the Native Americans have been living in those for a thousand years still do and you know the bugs don't eat them and they don't burn so they stick around we have here shibam in Yemen it's referred to as the Manhattan of the desert and you can see why those are all adobe buildings between five and eleven stories tall and using some techniques of passive cooling and that they're built in such a way that they shade each other which is important out there in the desert so the jhen a mosque in Mali West Africa and it's the largest adobe building by mass in the world today is hand packed mud blocks and mud plaster the locals have a party every year and replaster those three buildings that you just saw are made out of Adobe and this is how you make Adobe almost if you know you make forms you make sure your clay and your straw Sam and you pack it in there you let it set up enough that you could take the form off stand the block up let it dry in the Sun for a few weeks and then you build with it and people have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years and it's very effective when I love Adobe I'm not here to discard Adobe in any way the problems with Adobe are a to one it's very slow as you can see by the technique here to make the blocks and the other is that it's pretty much a regional product people think of Adobe's as Pueblo style Bill in New Mexico or West Texas or whatever because that's the only place they could do it because it's the only place where it didn't rain for long periods of time and they had some hot Sun and they could bake the blocks and then build with them so that's why it was it was confined pretty much too warm belts now we have hydraulic machinery and with this machinery we can we've expanded the geographical area that you can do earth blocks we can do it we've done it in Montana we've done it in Colorado we can do it in the snow we can do it anywhere actually so now these machine made Adobe's can create the same ambience and healthful environment that regular Adobe's did but anywhere in the world other advantages of this system are that the compressive strength at Adobe block by the New Mexico code is a minimum of 300 we average around 1500 we just had one tested in Fredericksburg that was 2,500 so they're much stronger another advantage is that they're absolutely dimensional they're flat on the top and the bottom they're all the same thickness as you can see them down here we can make them different thicknesses but we can maintain that thickness therefore we're using about 70% less mortar than an Adobe wall where you have thick mortar joints they're about 20% mortar in the wall we're using a quarter of an inch because we don't have to worry about leveling our course because our blocks are either so the strength the speed of manufacturing the speed of laying them up and the geographical expansion of earthen walls is one of the big advantages of our system these are several different blocks by different machine manufacturers the three on the left are from advanced earthen construction technologies a ect machines made in San Antonio Texas several at these blocks up here are a ECT I have two of their machines a small one and a big one the next one with the larger holes is made by Ito Matakana a very wonderful machine manufacturer in Mexico City the three smaller blocks on the right are from the Orem press which is a manual press from from the Oregon Institute in India whatdo was an earthen we'll all do for you this particular chart was created by Hassan Fathy a fairly famous Egyptian architect famous at least in our world who took brought earth and construction to Egypt this graph was then picked up by Gera not minke a German professor engineer who also preaches the dirt gospel and put it in his book and I grabbed it from there what we have here is an earthen building in a concrete building the yellow band across the middle is the human comfort zone that's where you're not too hot not too cold the black band which is the same on both graphs is the outside ambient temperature over the same 24-hour period in these two buildings and the red line is the interior temperature in those two buildings here we have the red line in the earthen building and there you have the red line in the concrete building so we can see some of the advantages of having a breathable wall that will help you control your interior temperature and humidity without fans wires or switches the next three slides are about energy consumption and gas emissions in the United States we think of factories we think of traffic jams we think of the things we're doing to the planet with all of this but these these three pie charts are indicative of something very important and you'll see it on this first one industry at 24 percent transportation at 28 percent and then buildings at 47 and a half percent this is the energy consumed in the United States so we're gonna get after the energy crisis we need to get after the architects the engineers the builders and we need to educate the public about what's happening with energy here's electricity to operate in the United States consumption by sector you see industry at 25 you can see that the electric car got buried so transportation isn't too much and then you see buildings so again we need to get after the the building industry if we're going to get after the energy crisis here's the final slide in this triumvirate of emissions of greenhouse gases again transportation those traffic are pretty bad industry doesn't share but buildings are the biggest culprit in the emission of greenhouse gases so it's about construction with natural breathable non-toxic materials is where we need to go the next few buildings you'll see our buildings in Colorado and New Mexico upon which I serve as a general contractor this first one is a Pueblo style which is what people think of when they think of Adobe or compressor of blocks they think of the Southwest they think of parapet walls flat roofs vigas and what-have-you this is an example of that and it's a it's a good one but we're not limited to that it can be any style you want here's a small castle for instance out of earth blocks yes you don't see too many turrets with witches caps on them in in Santa Fe this is a little different and here we have an octagon okay this is also out of earth blocks so the the style is is unlimited by this product it's a wall system and we can build anything you want I will give a little comment on octagons round is a lot easier so if you're gonna do something like this we would prefer to do round that an octagon we if anybody wants to know why we can talk about it afterwards here's another this was earth like one this was my house in Colorado for 18 years real simple big box with a gable roof and the heating and cooling system in this house remember this is in Colorado so we're not fighting quite as much heat as we are in Texas but in the summertime we get up in the 90s and my heating and cooling system for this house in the summertime was to go over to these four transom windows right here in the living room at night and open them and then close them in the morning and that was the entire my entire effort in heating cooling the house and it stayed right at 68 degrees all the time because I had massive thermal walls that were working for me these are interiors of those same buildings again we like breathable walls this is of all those lists of things you saw about the advantages of earth locks when we started this breathable is one of the most important so we want to preserve that that benefit by using natural plasters inside and out we use clay inside the lime outside these are some examples of those plasters they're beautiful the tree house here handles American clay which is a wonderful product we've used it in several buildings in 2003 I got called to Baja California sewer for a big development down there they decided to do it out of earth blocks and we made about two million lime stabilized earth blocks in Baja and they built quite a bit of the development with our lime stabilized blocks and with lime plaster and this is one of one of those buildings the Rhode Island School of Design RISD goes to San Miguel they I am they Mexico every year and contributes their architectural talents and designs a building for low-income sections of San Miguel this doesn't look like a low-income building I realized but this is a community building in the poorest neighborhood in San Miguel they chose to use our earth blocks we also do small buildings in fact we prefer small buildings this particular small building was built at Rancho La Puerta and Tecate Mexico this last summer over the course of two workshops the owners of Rancho La Puerta are contemplating a 200 unit eco village and they wanted to find a an ecological building system so there we were building this first house for an intern and then we hope that they will move forward and do their equal village out of earth blocks this is the smallest house I ever built this is in a backyard in San Antonio Texas it's 200 square feet and due to the earth block barrel vault roof there's a loft up there so you can sleep upstairs you've got a living room and a little bathroom and a little kitchen downstairs and this this house can very comfortably house a person or two people one doubt about it 200 square feet so it can be done Levittown New York this is where it started as far as the change that our country went through to stick building and suburbia bill Leavitt was in the Navy in World War two his job was to build efficient housing for the troops quickly mobile he became very good at it he came home to New York after the war his family was in the construction business he said there's hundreds of thousands of GIS coming home they want to buy houses they're gonna get GI loans what are we gonna do how and they're guiding light to answer this crisis was how fast can we build them and how chief can we build them and that's what they did and they were extremely successful and what you saw is Levittown and that suburban sprawl idea caught on like wildfire spread all over the country I understand it there was a housing shortage there was a burning need and so they did this unfortunately for us it's stuck and now we're still building these kind of buildings with little skinny hollow walls filled with pink insulation and sealed up so they cannot breathe that's a big deal we want to put sheetrock and paint on the inside and then on the outside let's let's wrap it in some sort of barrier and put vinyl siding on it and we built a thermos bottle the problem with building a thermos bottle is that all the air thus inside of that thermos bottle needs to be conditioned somehow air conditioned or heated or circulated in some way if you have an earthen wall that's not that way here's the earthen wall you have a thick thermal mass breathable and by breathable we mean able to absorb and release water vapor this isn't water this is water vapor water vapor molecules are the same size as air we want that to go in and out because it controls heat and humidity for us so our buildings are not thermos bottles they absorb and release water vapor and you can either have exposed earth locks if you see here we typically plaster the inside with the basecoat of place and straw and cactus juice we put on an interior clay finish again the American clay projects just great which you can also make your own on the exterior it's the same base coat we use the same base coat and then we use lime or lime and clay for the finished product and we're breathable that way we haven't destroyed that benefit of the wall if you if you slap cement stucco on the side of it you know you haven't ruined the building but you just took away one of the key benefits of that here's some examples this was in Tecate at the workshop you can see the three different plasters here this is the base coat of place and straw a little bit of lime and cactus juice and it's the same base coat inside now this is clay and sand this is on the inside as a finished coat and this is lime and sand and cactus juice exterior lime plaster why cactus juice and you see some ingredients over here the chopped straw which is the fiber in the base coat to or prevent cracking you can use the fibers that you buy for cement as well but the straw is actually better because we're trying to slow the cure any masonry product is better the slower it cures when the guy pours your driveway you should be out there wetting it down for three weeks to make it better but they don't but we're trying to dry slowly so the straw in the base coat holds moisture and and retires the drying the lime plaster on the outside you need to keep missing it you need to keep it shaded and let it cure slowly so that it works well the cactus juice is does three things for you basically it's real slimy snotty you mix that with your plaster and first of all it makes it easier to trowel on because it's slicker a second of all it's gooey and sticky so it's kind of a binder for you between your sand and clay and lime particles but the most important is the third feature which is we're trying to dry slowly and if you make you're plastered with water water evaporates pretty quickly if you mix her plaster with cactus juice it doesn't do that first very quickly it retards the drying so it's that's the main reason we put that aunts been used again like our whole system that cactus juice has been used for millennia well I'm plaster repels rain and snow no doubt about it just because it's breathable doesn't mean it leaks it's just like your skin you know you're absorbing water vapor and air through your skin and how do your stand all day every day but you don't leak you got in the rain you don't fill up with water well that's the same thing with our plasters this is an example this is in Lusaka Zambia we did a test house there of white lime plaster on the exterior now pure white isn't everybody's favorite but it's your first step against heat it says passive cooling at its finest white as a reflective source white lime plaster will reflect significantly more heat and light than white paint because it's a whole bunch of little particles of sand and lime and what-have-you and so it's a refractory it's like a prism it bounces that heat and light off the building so it's a good thing to do you can color it it's better to do pastels than something dark especially here in Texas it's hot so we're trying to stay light and stay cool this is the Mission San Xavier in Baja California when I first got to Loretto they were starting to remodel this mission and they heard that there was some guy down at Loreto Bay to do something about lime so they brought me a chunk because they were remodeling they brought me a chunk of the plaster off of the old mission and they said can you tell us what this is and I said well no I can't really I'm not a chemist but I will smuggle it back to the United States for you and take it to a chem lab and have them crush it up and tell me what's in it and I'll tell you let you know so the chem lab wrote on the back of this remaining piece bcs mexico circa 1697 1697 it's pretty old 40% a lime and 60 percent sand that's what this is nothing else so there's lime plaster work indeed it does breathable walls I keep pounding about breathable and I can't help it's it's real important we're absorbing and releasing water vapor this is a cooling device for you but here's how it works your wall is a battery okay we've got a little battery drawn here there's not really a battery on the wall but that's what it is it's absorbing the heat that you generate from inside the building this particular slide is for a cold winter day in Montana all right so you've got to generate heat inside somehow you're doing it with a wood stove you're doing it with a rocket mass heater you're doing it with passive solar design with the Sun coming through the glass perhaps you get radiant in-floor heating god forbid you've got a forced air system but whatever you've got you're generating heat inside the building if you're in a thermos bottle what you're heating is the air inside the building that's all you're heating if you're in an earthen building you're also heating the walls so that when you open the door and the warm air rushes out and in your thermos model the thermostat freaks out fires up earnest of fuel kicks you back up to whatever temperature you want her to be in an earthen building the wall go it's colder in there than I am and they let some of that stored heat out your battery works for you let's it out this is not to say you won't need heating system in Montana in an earth liability you do it's just gonna mitigate and minimize the amount of energy you need to maintain that comfort zone as we saw in the earlier slide here's warm in the winter this happens at night this is that same same building in Montana you've heated up the walls and it's real cold at night but again you've got some heat coming out of the walls that you store during the day and you're gonna use less heat to maintain your comfort zone cool in the summer and this has been a standard line about Adobe forever it's warm in the winter cool in the summer and it is and it is all by itself without a lot of other help so here we are in the summer you have a cool summer night so you want to cool the inside of your building like I said I did with my building open the windows at night let the cool air in shut him in the morning billowing stay cool all day so you can open the window at night you can run your air conditioner but again you're gonna run it significantly less than you are in any other type of building so here's here's the hot summer day now it's morning okay and the Sun has come up and the day is heating up the walls have absorbed this humidity at night because they're breathable and when the Sun hits them it evaporates that moisture it's an evaporative cooler your wall becomes an evaporative cooler this was proven by John Maroney who you see on the upper right here a scientist who lives in Del Rio Texas who built four little test modules he's now joined them all together and they're his house but originally they were four little buildings three were earth blocks one lime stabilized one cement stabilized one unstabilized the fourth building was concrete they were all exactly the same size here and put data loggers in them for a year and of course the concrete house just fried this is Del Rio it's 115 and it it was off the scale it was unfit for human habitation the three earth block buildings he was surprised to find very little difference no measurable difference in the heating and cooling in those three buildings but what shocked him and he didn't expect was that the coolest moment in the 24-hour cycle in the three earth on buildings was at 4:30 in the afternoon so the Sun had been pounding on the house all day and it was getting cooler and cooler and cooler and that's because it was evaporating the humidity that had been absorbed in the walls and it got cooler all day long this is a 5% lime stabilized earth block from Loreto Baja California sewer that was under water for one year so we took it out after a year and demonstrated that it's it's absolutely structurally sound it was completely saturated and filled with water but it maintained its structural integrity because the lime combined with the clay and stabilized the block this is in Baja California Sur also Jeff My partner and I were in Mexico City when Hurricane John hit the peninsula 90 mile an hour winds 30 inches of rain over the course of three days there were several buildings that were in the status that you see right here the reinforcement system in Loretto it's a high seismic zone the reinforcement system was concrete Castillo's concrete bond beams there was rebar in those channels and then after we built the blocks they poured all the concrete well there were several buildings in this situation when the hurricane hit where the concrete had not been poured I said 90 mile an hour winds thirty inches of rain for three days Jeff and Larry go and I wonder how it's going you know we got back and this picture was taken three days this is the hurricane in action but this picture was taken three days after the hurricane these freestanding panels of earth locks said is that the best you can do and they just stood there the there were several interior cinderblock wall CMU's that were in the same situation they had before the concrete yet and of course they blew over so you know it's a it's a heavy wall which is a good thing it's a very good thing they're fireproof absolutely you can't burn dirt this picture on the left is a client that we had in Colorado many years ago that made a video for us and this was taken from the video holding a roofing torch to the wall for 20 minutes and of course it just turned the wall black nothing happened the right-hand is my my crew right here in January was it was very cold and the house we were building at Fredericksburg so they made their own little thermal mass heater there in the corner and burn scrap wood and that so they'd have one warm corner to go to at lunch time in San Antonio there was a project was built and because we were inside the city limits they wanted to really prove that dirt doesn't burn okay so this is a block from a wall that was built in the testing lab in San Antonio and they put it to however many thousands of degrees of fire necessary and you can see what it did is it fired the surface of the block for about quarter of an inch so it got a lot harder just like a fire brick but obviously nothing happened anywhere else so that's the fire block on my way to visit one of my first customers in Texas who's seated here in the front row I was on my way to her house and I took a picture if you can see here of how it looked in Bastrop what you see in the background is the remnants of a house that did not survive that fire the remnants of course are the masonry section I got to Judy's and I started this whole spiel about earth locks and I was about five minutes into it she said Jim do they burn I said no they don't burn and she said that's what I want so there's Judy's house in Bastrop you can ask Judy about it after class they're bulletproof this is true this is uh again the customers in Colorado were NRA instructors so they had quite an arsenal of firepower we built a small test wall form and they fired all the pistols they had from 38 sup to 357 magnums all those pistol bullets hit the wall flattened out fell off the 30-30 rifle that bonnie is firing right there went in the wall about three inches so they are in fact bulletproof bulletproof is one thing you know but when you test for hurricane resistance at Texas Tech they have testing equipments and the way they do it is they they have a gun that fires a 2x4 at a hundred and fifty miles an hour at the subject wall to see what would happen well of course you do that to an earth block wall it bounces off it's laughable so we had our engineer calculate what the difference was between 150 mile an hour two-by-four and a 30-30 bullet and it's a it's significantly different but these didn't go through either so hurricane proof tornado proof it's a three little pigs and you can't blow this down you cannot blow this down that's a fact seismic reinforcement I build in a lot of seismic zones this isn't one of them but I have and it's real important built in Haiti and I built in Mexico and it's important to pay attention to what sort of reinforcement you need in a seismic zone this particular shake table that you're seeing here is in Lima Peru at the Universidad católica they are very concerned with seismic reinforcement of Earth and buildings because Peru shakes all the time and a lot of people live in adobe buildings so they've done a lot of research on what's that what's a reinforcement system that's gonna be affordable but we'll work this first building is unreinforced so this is an example of what happens to the people that live in these unreinforced Adobe's you can see I think this was a Richter 7 test day I don't I'm not this this is the kind of thing that gives Adobe a bad name right there doesn't look too good the second building that you're gonna see is exactly the same design but they've reinforced it with what we call the basket the second building has no rebar in it it simply has mesh on the inside and the outside and then at Berkeley they perfected it by actually through tying those those two wires together hence that's why we call it the basket so that's this building you can kind of see the mesh wrapped around there and you can see what happens with the same the same test this is the one you want to be in it did the similar test in Berkeley I know the engineer that was at that chest and they did a building that day they used the same building all the way through I started unreinforced and shook it a little bit until it would crack and then it would patch it and it was too expensive to do him over and over so they did that then they put a roof diaphragm on it they shook it a little bit till it cracked and they passed it and they did it over and this poor building had been through like eight earthquakes before they got to the final one which was the basket and they had threw tied the thing put it together they called the press and the TV stations I said come on over we're gonna knock it down today and they couldn't knock it down I've seen videos of that and it's a little different than this one this one actually shaking it in Berkeley it's a ground acceleration deal where they would run the table just stop wham like that and the building would do this and it would kind of pop back up and they did it over and over and over and they couldn't knock it over so this is pretty good testimonial to a good form of reinforcement at the University of Oklahoma in Norman we've had the good fortune thanks to the fellow in the cowboy on the red shirt there's dr. Charles Graham as the Dean of architecture at oh you used to be the Dean at A&M and he's a big earth lock fan they have a machine at A&M and now they have a machine at OU you and they combined the Department of Architecture combined with Habitat for Humanity to build two houses side-by-side as you see here exactly the same footprint same block one out of kindling I'm sorry out of sticks and one out of earth blocks and they these are finished now and the people have moved in and the universities got data loggers in there so we're real excited to see how they do it's a wonderful project and we're anxious to get the results different kinds of machines there are a multitude of machines around the world people have been mentioned during the blocks for a long time I am very familiar with three or four of them and those are the ones you're gonna see here this is the or impress which is manufactured at the Oroville Institute in India the fellow you see on the right there is sad from my Eenie he's the director of the Oroville Institute he's actually a French engineer but he went directly from Cartier in France to Oroville in 1989 he's been running it ever since he's an amazing guy just a wealth of knowledge I would recommend that you go to their website earth - or oval for the most comprehensive website I've ever seen on earth blocks it's just amazing what he's done and he designed this machine I have one of these machines in Texas we used one in Haiti and we've got one in Mexico it's a wonderful machine it's hard it's manual it takes two guys with a lot of effort to bake blocks but Sabourin gets a thousand blocks a day in India so and it'sit's unbelievably durable you could drop it off a three-story building and nothing would happen if you buy all the Chamber's he's got four you can make 75 different blocks it's an amazing machine this is the atomic econo from Mexico City this is the machine we're currently using in Haiti so the fellow you see standing over here is Francesco psst he's one of the owners of atomic Nakano but he's also the founder and driving force of this organization called H Allah - casa h la - casa has built in excess of 30,000 earth block houses in Mexico for people who need them through an incredible self-help program got the government involved got the banks have all got the people involved he's an amazing man h lo was nominated for the world habitat awards last year made the finals didn't win should have a amazing amazing guy and a good machine this is an AE CT machine made right here in San Antonio Texas this is mine it's this pictures in Mexico but that machine is now in Fredericksburg and there's Lawrence jeder the driving force of a ect a wonderful wonderful man who's been making block machines for about 25 years in San Antonio and he makes that was the small model this is the big model this picture was taken in Colorado this is three of Lawrence's AEC t35 hundreds underneath the covers over there this was in Baja California sewer where we were able to make 9000 blocks a day and we did make about 2 million blocks during that time I was there it was quite - quite the deal they were all lime stabilized I think it was the first time anybody had ever mass-produced lime lime stabilized block for a large development these are the buildings that were built with those blocks in Loretto other lime stabilized blocks and lime plaster and then we go back to the the founder of our industry if you will thus inva Ram which was invented in Bogota Colombia in 1956 it's basically the first compressed earth block machine of the modern era and the first major project with earth blocks was also in Colombia a community called Gavi Otis which is out on the eastern plains of Colombia if you don't know about it you should look it up because Paulo lagari a genius from Bogota his group of scientists decided that we needed to be able to build and live in places that were described as uninhabitable so they went out to the Yan Olsen Eastern Columbia nothing out there but a desert a few jack rabbits and snakes and they said here it is we're gonna build a community right here and show the world how you can live and what they did to make it livable was they planted 25,000 hectares of trees and now they live in a rainforest and they grow all their own food and they invent windmills and pumps and it's an amazing place the title of the book if you get it is Gaby Otis a village to reinvent the world nobody's ever heard about they don't publicize themselves but they have done this amazing amazing work and I followed Paulo lagari around for three days just like a little kid right and down close I never went to university because I didn't want to stop my thinking you know stuff like that and but when he would talk about problems she was talking about error problems he talked about water problems he could talk about soil problems he talked about food problems talk about people problems he'd go through all these things his solution was the same every time every time plant trees it fixes everything it fixes the air it fixes the water it fixes the soil makes it so you can grow things you plant trees so what's the other the flip side it has don't cut them you know we're we're a little short at this point you know they're clear-cutting in the Amazon this is a triple bottom line we've all heard about economic social environmental sustainability if you're not doing all three you're not doing it well this is a way to do it there's air there's water there's food there's shelter we're in a little niche in this we've got some dirt blocks and we're doing better houses we're not gonna save the world with this but we're trying to do our part but this is this is an example of how it can be done this particular home for a mother and her 11 children in San Miguel de and a was replaced with this there was a wonderful organization they're called casita Linda that builds a house a month and it gives them to needy needy people and that's her home now this is in Dolores Hidalgo just west of San Miguel sedessa as an organization that's worked with the county no communities in the city of 100 ato since 1950s they do wonderful things about water and food everything but they were still building out of fire bricks well we don't like fire bricks because that's fire that's fuel so we don't use any this house we were able to be given the permission to build a house on their campus in in dolores hidalgo and this one has has it all really it has earth block walls earth block roofs rainwater catchment a composting toilet great water recycling tada solar power you know the works and it's the direction where we're trying to go and we'll continue to go this was a house for the crow in montana sponsored by the bia the funding went through the university of colorado so they me up there to help him make blocks and I didn't I want to help them make blocks didn't hear anything more about it for a couple of years ran into Bernard a Maday from the University of Colorado and an engineer's Without Borders conference a few years later I said Bernard what happened did they build the houses what what happened you know and he smile you know they're complaining like oh were complaining what's the matter and he said well we got a call last January and the inhabit of the found said it's too warm in here this is January in Montana and the engineer said open the window so they were they were pretty well designed this is in San Antonio Texas it has I was engaged in making the blocks for this project and that's where this fire test block came from and it had significance because it was the first project of this size out of earth blocks inside the city limits of a major US city so we we broke some ground there by getting into San Antonio with compressed earth blocks maybe we use story poles angle iron put it up on the corners pull a string as long as those story poles are plumb and square of the building our forming system is to line blocks and a string which you can see here we slide it up and down the story pulls the Mason set the blocks to the string the wall is perfectly plumb perfectly straight building is perfectly square it's a real simple system and it works real well as long as the Masons follow the string and here we have one of our Mason's setting the block to the string there he is and that's how it works you can see the story pole this is on the house and Fredericksburg right now bond beams are a critical part of any masonry structure we use them of course you can use wood you see a graphic of that system here I prefer to use concrete because I don't like to put temporary products in my permanent buildings so we use steel reinforced concrete for the bond beam and on the lower side there you'll see I'm pouring the bond beam in Chiapas and then we over here that's me guiding some concrete into the bond beam on the building in fredericksburg by virtue of this wonderful tool they concrete pumper truck we like earthen roofs too this is a low cambered earth block barrel vault roof on my 30 meter house in Mexico and this is Bernard a mod a the founder of engineers Without Borders at one of our workshops doing his first squinch for an earth block vault this vault that you see are all throw earth blocks and those are the little cuneus bricks eyes that are made with the or impress again the triple bottom line local people local material and moving it around this is in Chiapas you can see them with working with their arm press there here we have the arm press in on the upper side and Zambia on the lower side in Haiti here's mohaka Mexico note the gender of the crew the guys are up here so the women were building their houses this is with Annie Tommy economist this is Dylan my favorite project I've been dead a long 15 times since 2009 and this was the school when we got there there's about 400 kids that go to this school that's the school that's it and these are the children that go to that school they're adorable or wonderful and this picture is of significance because the second the second building they're standing in front of the first building there we just started the second building and we were doing some training some classes we were trying to get the community involved in our system we did three Saturdays in a row the first Saturday we had 17 people was it kind of disappointing this is the third Saturday which is two weeks later we had 50 people so the community came out in force and became involved and from that group we developed a team of Mason's that I would take anywhere anywhere these guys are fabulous and this is them at work I call it masonry Orchestra because they're they got it they got it all figured out the walls are plumb the walls are straight the blocks are great and this is the atomic honor system with the vertical read our horizontal rebar in the u-blox and what have you then they built Tom and I just returned last week from this building and I had no supervision on this building we made the blocks and built the walls themselves we went to just help them figure out the roof framing and this perfect perfectly plumb perfectly straight and on their own I feel real successful about what we've left there and what they can do this is that same project that's the school complex there this is the first building with Oram blocks the second building with atomic ikana and the third building is also etal blocks in and it's nearly nearly complete Salada we're back in Texas now here we are in welfare called the whole enchilada because Maria came to one of our workshops in San Antonio drank the kool-aid and said I want a tall so she has earthen walls earthen roof earthen floor earth and plaster composting toilet rainwater catchment gray water recycling the whole thing you know it's great just great when you get a client like that walks the talk this is that same house nearing near completion this is the current project in Fredericksburg earthen walls or the roof or the floor or the plastic rainwater catchment what have you my crew is sitting over here at the table they they've done this and they're they're great and it's a wonderful wonderful project and a wonderful client water catchment from a barrel roof is real easy you know you just make the valleys run one direction and you can get it all real simple same building again from the other side you see these arches out in front these are fired bricks and I have a maestro coming up from Mexico next month he's gonna finish the boulders that's a porch roof this is how those barrel balls look from the inside and that's again these we made these little skinny six by twelve and then we set them up on edge like that and tom has created with a Sketchup home in the future where we're we're kind of backing away from the tiny house thing and we call it the cozy house because we're not gonna do the 200 square foot or but this is this footprint is 800 square feet it's 20 by 40 and again with the big barrel vault you have lofts so you have a lot more floor space within that small footprint and this is an interior shot of that same thing this is gonna be Tom's house we've we're closing on six and a half acres in Stonewall and we're gonna walk the talk and this one will be we'll be out there that's the six and a half acres it's called the Texas eco village right now I'm calling it the Texas land cooperative TLC there's nothing there right now except to seasonal streams and some oak trees but we intend to regenerate this piece into a food forest that does everything for us we're gonna grow our own food we're gonna catch our own water we're gonna put sawdust on our poop and we're gonna do it right so come be involved at some point if you like this is gonna happen so what if we change the way we build questions [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Earth Block International

Views: 144,172

Rating: 4.9000554 out of 5

Keywords: Jim Hallock, Compressed Earth Blocks, Earth Block, Earth Block International, Earth Block Texas, earthen construction, Sustainable Architecture (Industry), sustainable construction, earth friendly, regenerative design, adobe, Tom Taber, Kevin MacLeod, thermal mass, LEED, Hassan Fathy (Architect), Gernot Minke, AECT, Ital Mexicana, Auram Press, Auroville (City/Town/Village), Auroville Earth Institute, Tierra y Cal

Id: IuQB3x4ZNeA

Length: 47min 29sec (2849 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/jedielfninja]

I live for earth ship type sustainable building. better bills and they seem a lot sturdier than a framed house.

I'M GOING IN! will report back

[u/jedielfninja]

Fantastic video on home thermodynamics. Wow. The earth walls being able to absorb water vapor and then release it to have an rvaporative cooling effect when the sun hits it in the morning makes so much sense.

[u/ChimpanEh]

Very cool! I had planned on giving T-Studs a boost but now I'll have to reconsider

https://youtu.be/GjO47WRmX3A

[u/Powerful_Reward_8567]

Never heard of this. Interesting.

[u/barrybible]

As someone who enjoys thinking about DIY building, I'm a big fan of these more traditional construction methods. I know he's giving a sales pitch, not a technical talk, and I don't expect him to go into technical details (nor do I think he has the knowledge to give engineering details). That said, I'm unconvinced about how this kind of structure would perform in high-seismicity areas, unless it was designed similar to a reinforced masonry structure. He references a Berkeley study that supports his claims... he'd have a lot more credibility if he posted a link to this study on his website, or at least cited the reference. It's a little suspicious that he hasn't done this, and that most of his examples are from low-seismicity areas in the US, or from Mexico and Haiti.

All that aside, if I lived in a part of the world with low seismic activity, I'd be interested in giving this a trial run... maybe build a man cave or workshop and see how it goes. Hopefully this guy is able to get more research into this, and to develop this into more widespread usage.

[u/InternationalBuckeye]

Or earth bags !

[u/Altruistic_Ad2074]

Well I am seriously intrigued! This is pretty amazing! Why haven’t I heard of this before? Why aren’t we building houses everywhere with this? Ugh !!!

[u/Kmartin47]

Building a house made from hemp myself.