Archive for “Natural Building” category
Showing results 1 - 5 of 56 for the category: Natural Building.
16 May 2012
What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century? While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site. However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it). The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself. As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.
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26 Sep 2011
I loved Ed Mitchell’s post over on the Transition Network site as part of the ‘fantastic ‘social reporters’ project. There are 12 ‘social reporters’ around the UK who will be blogging in a rota, producing one blog post every day, on a subject set by a guest editor at the beginning of the week. Ed’s was called “A liminal song of thanks”, and in it he wrote:
“That’s why we’re staying up late, working on personal time, finding friends who don’t want to support this future, even though it seems unavoidable, and jamming with them, making it up as we go, sharing our personal stories, openly, our successes, our failures, our hopes, our dreams, our loves. Our vegetables. Wrestling with content management systems that aren’t as perfect as our hopes”.
Beautiful. No mention of making your own paint out of cheese though. So I thought I’d better put that right this morning.
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23 Sep 2011
As part of last weekend’s Transition Town Totnes Open Eco-Homes weekend, I visited a house in Lower Allerton that was built in the 16th century, and which has recently been making many changes to reduce its environmental impact. As regular readers will know, I have done a fair bit of cob building in my time, and have often had to deal with the question “won’t it just wash away in the rain”, a question as infuriating to cob builders as Three Little Pigs jokes are to straw bale builders. The highlight for me, therefore, of the visit to Lower Allerton, was the 500 year-old cob walls.
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5 Jul 2011
I have, on occasion, reflected here at Transition Culture about how the natural building movement, with its leaning towards natural building materials such as straw, clay, hemp and so on, has yet to really explore how those materials might be used to retrofit existing homes. Virtually all of the work done around those materials focuses on new build, but finally, it seems some work is happening on retrofits. An MPhil dissertation done at University of Cambridge by Keven Le Doujet entitled “Opportunities for the large scale implementation of straw based external insulation as a retrofit solution of existing UK buildings: how much of a good idea is it to externally insulate existing UK buildings with straw bales?” explores this very question. It is a fantastic and comprehensive piece of work which is a pleasure to read.
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11 Apr 2011
We are now in editing mode for ‘The Transition Companion’ (out in September). The draft is way too long, so some bits are being cut. The following piece has been cut way down, so I wanted to post it in full here, as I rather liked it (!). First there is the piece from the book, and then the interview I did with Justin Bere, in full, a riot of delights for passivhaus/local building materials fans out there….
The 'Larch House' in Ebbw Vale, Wales.
The ‘holy grail’ in terms of the construction of new sustainable buildings is homes that reach the highest level of energy efficiency, whilst also using as high a proportion of locally sourced materials as possible, what we might call ‘The Local Passivhaus’. Two buildings, recently completed in Ebbw Vale, known as ‘The Lime House’ and ‘The Larch House’ have moved this concept forward significantly.
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