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A History of Building with Earth
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Earth has been the most widely used construction material for at
least 10 000 years and even today at least a third of the
world’s population live in houses built of earth.
Today,
with the high and
increasing cost of
modern construction
materials, most
people in developing
countries cannot
afford to use them. Hence the use
of earth, the most ancient and ubiquitous of building materials
and a do-it-yourself approach.
Since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels have made possible
most of the construction in developed countries, meaning that
they have been able to overcome the limitations of human labour.
This has been at enormous
cost in terms of pollution and carbon emissions, massive
overconsumption of resources and an increase in unemployment.
People in industrialised countries are rapidly realising that
the days of cheap energy and gross wastefulness are numbered.
The quest for low cost, healthy, non-polluting, low
energy building materials and techniques is gaining momentum,
and earth is being rediscovered as being superior to so-called
modern materials such as concrete, glass and steel.
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1000 year-old earth-built skyscrapers- Shibam, Yemen
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Earth construction
techniques have been
known for over 10 000
years. Mud brick (adobe)
houses dating from 8000
to 6000 BC have been
discovered in Russian
Turkestan (Pumpelly,
1908) and rammed earth
foundations dating from
ca. 5000 BC
in Assyria.
The
4000-year-old Great Wall
of China was originally
built solely of rammed
earth; only a later
covering of stones and
bricks gave it the
appearance of a stone
wall.
Many centuries ago, in
dry climatic zones where
wood is scarce,
construction techniques
were developed in which
buildings were covered
with mud brick vaults or
domes without formwork
or support doing
construction. Bronze age
discoveries have
established that in
Germany, earth was used
as an infill in
timber-framed houses or
to seal walls made of
tree trunks. Wattle and
daub was also used.
The oldest example
of mud brick walls
in northern Europe,
found in Heuneburg Fort near
Lake Constance, Germany
dates back to the 6th
century BC.
In Mexico,
Central America and
South America, adobe
buildings are known in
nearly all pre-Columbian
cultures.
The rammed
earth technique was also
known in many areas,
while the Spanish
conquerors brought it to
others.
In Africa, nearly
all early mosques
are built from
earth. In the
medieval period,
earth was used
throughout Central
Europe as infill in
timber-framed
buildings, as well
as to cover straw
roofs to make them
fire-resistant. In
France, the rammed
earth technique
called terre
pise, was widespread
from the 15th to the
19th centuries. Near the
city of Lyon, there are
several such buildings
that are more than 300
years old and still
inhabited.
In Germany, the
oldest inhabited
house with rammed
earth walls dates
from 1795. Its
owner, the director
of the fire
department, claimed
that fire-resistant
houses could be
built more
economically using
this technique, as
opposed to the usual
timber frame houses
with earth infill
(Minke G
–‘Building with earth’ –
2006)
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Mosque of Djenne, Mali-
Adobe
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Blair Burrows House, Ontario – Rammed Earth
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Nk' MIP Desert
Interpretive Centre,
Canada- Rammed Earth
Wall
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Weilburg, Germany,
1828 - Rammed Earth
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Al Midhar Mosque, Yemen - 38m tall, adobe
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