On that website, I found an interesting article (http://lauriebaker.net/work/work/alternative-building-materials-timeless-mud.html) about the use of mud as a construction material (he has another article about Lime as well). Some excerpts:
Before we came along with our high technologies and our science, people over thousands of years were doing what we are now pleased to call research and development. Anywhere you go in India, any village, any rural area (and remember, there is still over 80 per cent of the population in rural areas and their needs are 80 per cent of the needs of the nation), there is this, `rural' design that is steadily going on, and this research is not something that was thought out suddenly. They did not have research institutes. It was a system of trial and error — an empirical form of development. People have used what is actually underneath them and around them: the earth, the things that they can pull out of the earth and so on. They used simple materials to protect themselves from the rain, sun, animals, insects and other human beings. They had very primitive forms of transport, and there was never any thought of importing materials, all of which has resulted in this very distinctive architecture. I insist on calling these 'rural indigenous designs' for building. I think they're very fine examples of pure architecture because they use materials honestly and straightforwardly in an enormous variety of ways, and find solutions to all the problems we human beings have, living in a somewhat hostile world.
{another section of the article}
I have to think twice when I have to build a house — an ordinary 2,000 ft for middle class/upper middle class persons, because I'm responsible for the death of four large trees! In Kerala, all bricks are burnt by wood; we don't get coal. It's too far away and transport is too difficult, so I have had to lay off wood. What are my alternatives to things that bricks normally do? One of them is stone, another of them is mud. The biggest problem that I have in using mud is not with the mud itself, (I have done two-storeyed buildings with quite heavy roof structures and so on, and intermediate floor structures with mud) but it is the client: "We don't want mud", or "Mud? You mean to say I should build my house with mud?"; "But you do understand, don't you, that in my position...." This is the usual reaction of so many of our clients and we just give in and say, "Yes, all right, if you don't want mud, we'll have brick." We don't tell a client that he is going to destroy four full-grown trees to have his bricks. Are we using our knowledge and our position and our professional status to suggest these things and even insist on them with a private client, and these private clients are probably only 0.01 per cent of the population?
There are other compelling arguments in that article why houses (specially for the poor) can be built at a low monetary and energy cost, just using timeless techniques from India. Made me thank my stars we had the good judgement to choose the house we are now building is to be made precisely of that material: MUD. They are compressed mud bricks, not fire burnt bricks. Here is the link to the architect who is building our house (http://www.biome-solutions.com/). My question is: Why are not more people doing this?
1 comment:
In 1977 Divi Seema uppena in which more than 10000 people died, it was said that the traditional gudise (hut) could with stand high velocities of wind. The design was brilliant and the result of centuries of experience. it iscool inthe summer and warm in winter madewith local biofriendly produse.Pity is that all this has to come to us thru a forigner.
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