These Sustainable DESERT DOMES Will Blow Your Mind!

hi I'm Nicolette and my name is Ian and we're going to tour the Mojave Center today [Music] our Mojave Center is located one hour west of Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert we experience extreme heat and extreme cold we have very little desert foliage and very little water we are one of the driest places in the world less than two inches a year in rain but it is very beautiful and it's very special in our hearts so we are an education center we focus on natural building natural plasters and Desert Water harvesting here in the desert we started with Earth bags or the Earth domes because it was the fastest easiest cheapest and most sustainable way to start building out here the bags are filled with the dirt that you see beneath our feet which is silt and sand basically we have zero clay in our soil and so the domes were the easiest way to start building foreign the domes themselves are made of sandbags filled with dirt five percent cement and that's basically it so it's the most easily accessible building style for this area and so as you see here behind me we have quite a few we have nine on site already and the ones you see right behind me are going to be student dwelling homes so for when we have workshops here students can come learn how to build a stone while simultaneously being able to sleep in a dome these domes behind me are eight foot in diameter domes they were built in they range from about five to eight days of completion which is pretty great that's for the building stage and then about two weeks in finish work so plasters door installs window installs and such so as I mentioned before Dome these domes can be built really quick how we build them is we put a center compass in the middle of the Dome with a chain and a key ring on the end our chain is our Center compass and it's basically giving us a perfect circle with around in our in our side of our Dome to keep us on Compass we lay our foundation first which is just Earth bags as well but we add 10 cement into our dirt soil mix as well from there we fill the bags with dirt we Tamp them and then lay barbed wire in between each row so each row has a layer of barbed wire to add tensile strength and this helps with the earthquake resistance or any type of movement that will happen and add to the structural Integrity of the building as we go up in height there's also another height compass that is across the Dome and it gives us what we call a Lancet r Arch or a Gothic Arch this is very like basic geometry math right as we're raising this High Compass up it's giving us an arc and then simultaneously we're matching our Center compass with our height Compass to give us each ring As We Lay separately layer by layer until eventually the Dome closes in giving us that perfect arch and the structural Integrity that we're looking for so some of the benefits of building with Earth bags is well there's many one that we like is they are earthquake resistant they're also completely flame retardant which means they will not burn down they're made of dirt they are not insulated but they are thermal Mass so what that means is it's basically like a cave the sun is heating the outside the sun is coming through the walls very very slowly through the walls of Earth and then slowly making its way on the inside it normally makes its way inside like the heat makes its way inside during the middle of the night which is the best time that you want heat coming into your building so they're a great building style for the desert because we get such harsh extra temperature swings from cold to hot foreign so once we've finished building our domes we're going to go and talk about plasters now so the main thing to think about with plasters is that we have to protect these polypropylene bags and so the easiest way to do that is with the cheap and simple clay plaster so this is an example of a very rough clay plaster this is just what we used on the outside to cover the bags it's really cheap it's accessible you can use most of your native soil if you have Clay in there to make this faster so if you look up close here it's just going to have points of sand in it so we use concrete sand you're going to have different layers of straw mixed into that mix and then you're going to have Clay as our binder to bring everything together um so it's important to cover these bags otherwise over x amount of hours maybe about 2 000 hours you're going to have degrading of the bags and you're going to need to protect those so this is a very basic plaster that we'll first do when we're done with our Dome so after we've finished our rough base coat plaster to cover the bags this would be the next step so this is the largest dome that we have here and it takes a lot of plastering strength to finish this and so we're still forming a little bit of the edges to make sure that it's nice and smooth and an egg shape okay so after you do that rough plaster you're going to go ahead and put on a lime and cement plaster mainly because these these domes don't have roofs and we need to make sure that our plaster is acting as strong as possible so we incorporate lime cement and sand into this plaster and that's why it turns this gray color right here so welcome to one of our largest domes at our demonstration site this one is a 16 foot diameter Dome and a eight foot diameter Dome and a 10 foot diameter Dome tied into itself so these two domes are ABS into this large one this one is a living space so this is going to be a demonstration of a small house that you can make so this is a living space this will be a small kitchenette over here and this will be once again a bedroom um so similar to what we did with the rough plasters on the outside we'll do the same thing on here so that we can shape this and make it look really smooth so that's what we've already started to do on this side here so you can see how the bags start to disappear and now you're starting to smooth out the shape and make it look more warm and welcoming this one still needs work on here for the base plaster but the idea is that once we're done with all this this will be a welcoming representation of a small Earth home that someone or a couple could live inside of so some unique features about this Dome is that we want to incorporate some passive Cooling so this is an example of a wind scoop and so this is an attachment on the outside of the Dome that will bring air from the top of the building down through it and then entering into this room the main space and the other room oh okay man I'm in okay oh my God how did I get up here so I'd like to introduce the Skylight so most of these domes if you don't open up the top of them especially on larger ones what can happen is you can make a cave and uh we're not cave dwellers we're trying to demonstrate what an actual house would look like so we put some natural light at the bottom but at the top it's nice to have some additional natural light that comes through the top so with this one we just put a very simple plexiglass sheet at the top and decided not to close out the Dome and leave this open so that we can get some nice natural light at the top it also acts as a venting system so when the hot air rises to the top of the Dome during the summer time we can go ahead and open this up and vent it out in the evenings cooling down the building so we talked about the Lyman cement as our second stage of plastering on the Dome the final cap that we like to do is a elastomeric paint so this has a low vo suit a VOC or the volatile organic compounds and you can find this at any hardware store or Home Depot and this is nice because we can put this building in a really wet climate and nothing will deteriorate the plaster so it's important to have that strong layer underneath that lime and cement with the sand on top of that rough plaster and then finally the skin at the top is this elastomeric paint which we do about four gallons on just an eight footer and this will this paint will last for more than 10 years and it's easy to repair and like I said it's really great for a wet climate so now we're going to take a look inside of one of our eight foot student dwelling homes this one is finished it has the Earthen floor and the final coat plaster to finish these domes we start with just like we do on the outside we do a clay base coat plaster then we refine the materials do a clay mid coat and then we do an even finer materials to make a clay final coat plaster okay here we are back at our shower Dome one of the things that we do at the Mojave Center Beyond natural building is we are trying to restore regenerative water harvesting in desert desert ecology in our Center so we recycle our water here so our shower Dome behind us here feeds all all of our plants that we started growing here this is just one example of a desert rain Basin that we're starting we have a bunch of them on site and they're going to be a lot more but this one here we're starting with native plants to start help bringing green back into our desert here's a quick look of our shower Dome on site this one this space is one of the most magical spaces on our property we have a rain shower where all the water comes down and then feeds the plants on the outside inside this was also made from earthbag we have an earth bag bench that you see here and then what makes this space unique is it has a lime plaster on the um on the interior which makes it waterproof from any splashing this is almost complete we still need our floor which we'll cap this off and then a little bit more of the final coat plasters on the inside but we're really happy with the space and this is like I said the most magical space on our property I think all right thanks for doing a short tour with us and stay tuned as we continue our workout here be sure to check out our website we host an array of workshops out here ranging from plaster parties and own building our 2023 season will be launching soon and we hope to see you out here we post a lot of updates on our Instagram as well be sure to check that out and follow along and we can't wait to see her in the desert bye [Music]

Channel: Natural Buildings

Views: 1,260,218

Keywords: earthbag, earth bag, hyperadobe, hyper adobe, superadobe, super adobe, dome house, dome home, earthbag dome, earth bag dome, dome, Mojave, Mojave Desert, Mojave Center

Id: 7yUOb9HpEN4

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2022