The Importance of Sustainable Building

Here in the west, the industrial revolution marked a move to the use of more standardised products and materials which inevitably isolated us from our local environment, community and our own creativity. Ultimately we have been denied access to determine and shape our own buildings. Issues such as the unsustainable consumption of wood and the excessive logging that is taking place worldwide, and the pollution caused by the production processing and transport of materials

Modern building methods are environmentally destructive and their impact on our environment is huge. The extraction, processing and transport of materials, the energy involved in their construction, maintaining the environments within them and the problems of recycling/disposal when they are destroyed creates a massive drain on our resources, pollutes our air and water and is ultimately unsustainable.

Buildings can isolate and dislocate us from the natural systems with which we are interdependent or they can empower and educate us to achieve an harmonious balanced relationship within these systems. Therefore if we as a culture wish to address with any credibility issues of waste reduction, consumption and sustainability we must develop a built environment which reflects and promotes these aims.

Sustainable building technologies

Cob - a traditional mixture of earth, sand, straw and water mixed by hand or machinery. Formed into lumps and pressed together to form the walls of a building, rather like building a giant clay pot. Cob structures are load bearing. Excellent thermal mass which is necessary for passive solar design.

Adobe - a mixture of earth, sand straw and water mixed by hand or machinery, formed into bricks which are then left to dry out in the sun. These are used in a similar way as conventional fired bricks to build walls. Adobe is load bearing.

Wattle and Daub - A woven willow or hazel framework (Wattle) is then daubed with a Daub plaster mixture of earth and dung and sometimes horse hair. Used as infill in a timber framed building.

Straw bale - Can be used as an infill to timber frame structures, straw bales are used as an very effective insulator. They can be load bearing if they are pretensioned. Bale walls are then sealed with a earthern or lime plaster.

Timber - Uses large diameter/section timber posts and beams to form a framework of a frame building. The gaps between the timbers require another building material to infill the walls.

Pise de terre - A form of cob building

Light straw - Shuttering is created to ram straw dipped in a clay slip as an infill to a timber clay frame structure. Very good insulator.

Earthships - Using discarded tyres, earth is rammed into them, they are then bermed into a bank and daubed with a cement or lime plaster.

Rammed earth - wooden shuttering is created then a mixture of earth, sand and water sometimes stabilised with cement. The mixture is rammed between the shuttering often using hydraulic machinery. The forms are removed to leave load-bearing walls, sealed with an earthern or lime plaster.