Earthbags???

I was researching alternatives to cement and came across an interesting concept in building - building with Earthbags.  I know, sounds weird.  But I guess the word television sounded weird to people when it came out too.  Here's a link to a blog I started reading: https://earthbagbuilding.wordpress.com/
It takes the concept of building with compressed earth and puts it into bags, which form the blocks to build with.  I like the idea that the earth can be taken directly from the site and doesn't need to be of any particular consistency or have a certain amount of clay to give it it's strength.  I read the bags can be made of burlap, but that has the tendency to rot, and that polypropylene is better, but they need to be protected from too much sunlight.  I don't have a background in chemistry, but any thing that starts with a poly- sounds man-made to me and makes me believe they have their environmental drawbacks.  What I like about the idea of compressed earth blocks, is that they can eventually be destroyed and turned back into flat earth.  The earth bags would have to be emptied by hand, and then you have a pile of, albeit reusable, polypropylene bags on your hands.
Further along in the blog he talks about using rice husk ash as a replacement for cement in compressed earth blocks.  So far the studies I've read replaced cement by up to 30% with the ash and kept similar qualities. But I don't know why it can't completely be replaced.  I also wonder, what happens when you want to use the land for something else?  Can the building that uses compressed earth with it's mixture of soil, hay, and cement or rice husk ash, biodegrade?  What happens to the acidity of the soil when the blocks are torn down?  Can you grow food on that soil?  Is it reusable?  I hope to find out.

How much space do we really need?

When my husband and I were first married we shared a half a house with another couple.  We had a 13 x 17 bedroom and a bathroom to ourselves, but everything else we shared with sometimes two or three other people.  My husband brought boxes of stuff over from Germany, still don't know what all was inside of them, but there were enough of them to build a makeshift wall about 4 feet high.

I brought over whatever I needed for work from my apartment in California, but the rest of my stuff went to my parents basement, their garage, my old room.  There were a handful of outfits that I wore on a regular basis, and I didn't really need heavy winter clothes in Florida, so they got stored, somewhere.  You know,  just in case one day it snowed.

When I got pregnant we moved into a two bedroom apartment and somehow along the way we acquired enough stuff to fill that.  When my son was two we bought a three bedroom house with a two car garage, and filled that too.  The guest room was really just more storage space and after a year or so we couldn't park any of our four cars in the garage that we found a way to fill with more stuff we needed or would need at some point.

When we moved to Germany with our now three kids, we scaled back, to what turned out to be two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and dining room.  There are two rooms downstairs, one for storage, and one that is heated and can be used as a guest room.  The garage holds the car, because after 4pm there's no street parking, and it's so tight there's no room for anything else. And the way I drive, it hardly holds the car, itself.  I packed up 73 boxes, only a third of what we owned in Florida, and still I have about a third of that still unpacked in my basement over here.

Sure it gets loud, but I can vacuum my house in under a half hour.  I know when every child is doing something dangerous without having to leave my bed. But everyone still has enough private space, and we don't have to buy a bunch of stuff so that the rooms look like they have a purpose.  At first the kids shared a room and we had our own room.  Then as my son got older he got one of the bedrooms, and the girls share one, and we converted the dining area to our master bedroom by placing cabinets to divide the space.  One of the ideas was to get the toys out of the living area, and to give my son some privacy.  So what happened?  My son makes up excuses to sleep in his sisters room, his room is pretty much just a mess, and the toys make their way into the living area, usually under your bare feet, generally when carrying some hot or fragile.

They like to be together.  When I try to get some space, they come find me.  They have to be touching me or sitting very close to me.  They have to be on the same spot on the couch together and fight over it, even though there's plenty of space on the other end of the couch.

At what point in their lives do humans want to be alone in a 18x24 bedroom with nothing but furniture, trinkets, and electronics?  I mean normal, healthy people, not over-stressed, over-stimulated, over-tired moms of young children.
I finally convinced myself that my old clothes and old toys I that could never before part with would be better off with strangers that needed them then they would be sitting in a box in my basement.  The first thing I sold was the bed in the guest bedroom.  The woman who bought it for me sent me a picture of her daughter's new room featuring my old bed.  I couldn't have been happier.  That bed had a purpose.  It was being loved by a little girl who now had a big girl bed.  And I had one less burden in my life.

Eye Candy

When I was studying architecture in Los Angeles I learned the term "Eye Candy."  Stuff that looked really cool, caught your eyes, made you take a second look.  These seemed to be the projects that got the most attention.  For me what was important was substance.  I was so busy trying to get my projects to have some sort of substance, I often ran out of time to make the look fancy or eye-catching. I was a minimalist in a world of maximalists.

Out of school, trying to deal with the real world, I'm faced with this same idea again.  Just trying to get my kids to wear appropriate clothing is a struggle. Everyone, at every age (yes, I mean you, my beloved 4 year old) has their won sense of style, of comfort, of what they think is important to them to showcase themselves to the rest of the world.

It's the same with housing.  Everyone has different ideas of what to them is a beautiful house.  I remember driving through Beverly Hills with a friend of my brothers who just loved every huge mansion he saw, regardless of what it looked like. He just liked it because it was big.  I have a friend who lived in a developed community in Florida where every house looked exactly the same.  Although hers was painted a slightly different shade of green.  My parents had a house where the living room ceiling opened up to a gallery of the upstairs and an entry that was a double story space.  It was the only house on the street that did that.  It got really hot in the summer time, my room was tiny because they were trying to squeeze 4 bedrooms into a space big enough for three.  But it was an awesome space, not just for throwing laundry and toys down at my brother standing below, but for lying on the couch and staring up at the sloped ceiling and watching the shadows of the walls and railing pass as the sunlight moved across the room.

But when we talk about the affordability of building houses, where do we start skimping?  What makes something more of a necessity than something else? When you build in a resource poor community, what is your choice of building material?  The push from the west is to go green. Use local materials.  Use local resources.  But the east wants trendy cool eye catching stuff just like the west does too.  Why should they be left behind?  

Is there a way to use local materials and make it look cool and trendy?  Is that an expense they can afford?  Can they afford not to?  If we used traditional ways of building using local materials, but jazzed it up or cladded it differently, would it make it more desirable?  So much of why traditional building techniques aren't used by the wealthier people in resource poor areas, is because of cultural biases and stereotypes.  How do we make them cool again?  Its a common phenomena in the US that poor communities get infiltrated by poor artists who then make the area look cool to wealthy people and suddenly the property prices soar out of control. Is there a way to make traditional building techniques, which tend to be environmentally friendly and most suitable to the climate, cool again?  Without it becoming so cool (and therefore expensive) that it remains accessible to everyone?

Compressed soil block construction can look like, umm well, compressed soil blocks.

Compressed soil blocks can look cool too!  Here is an example of a structural vault built out of compressed soil blocks built from local soil for a new museum at the World Heritage Site of Mapungubwe in South Africa designed by Peter Rich Architects.  Michael Ramage (Cambridge), John Ochsendorf, and Philippe Block designed the unreinforced structural masonry vaults in collaboration with Henry Fagan in South Africa. Matthew Hodge developed the cement-stabilized tiles in collaboration with Anne Fitchett (Univ. of Witwatersrand). Based on his experience building the domes of the Pines Calyx in the UK, James Bellamy supervised the vault construction on site.