The house the Earth built

This week at the farm, there was a natural construction workshop. A couple of the participants from the permaculture workshop last week have stayed over for this workshop, so there´s quite a few familiar faces. The volunteers have been working to get all the clay and other materials ready for the workshop, so I´m eager to see it all start to take shape.

The wood structure for the house was finished last week. This will form the base of the house.


We also spent a lot of time last week filling feedbags of rocks to form the foundation for the walls of the house. It took a long, long time, but it´s obviously a really important part of the process. Then we got to work, laying the tongue&groove for the roof, mixing the dry clay in mixing ponds (which are extremely cold to hop into early in the day!) and making the mezcla (mixture) of clay, straw and sand in motorized mixers (thank God).

Then, we started laying the bricks of clay on top of the bags of rocks, to form the walls.

The bricks are puttied in place with more of the clay mezcla and then a full layer of the clay is laid on top. Then more bricks and clay until the wall is done.

On the other south side of the house, the walls are built of straw bales. Since this side of the house is fairly warm and straw is considerably cheaper (yet still sound and stable), this was a good alternative. And much faster than mezcla!

Within two days, we had enough of the walls done to start on the living roof. We took sod from a nearby pond project to layer on top of the roof. Nothing goes wasted here.

While the bricks and new clay were drying, we moved into a nearby structure to work on fully constructed walls. A different variation of mezcla, mixed a flour recipe and guano (yes, chicken poo) is used to bind the clay walls and prep for the weather-proof layer.

From here, we set Bamboo frames into the wall and wove bamboo shoots in to create designs and structural details (shelves, mirror frames, wine-bottle window settings).

The bamboo is then covered with clay-soaked straw,


which is finished with clay plaster and the same weather layer.

The end result is a fully natural, weather-proof (it snows here in winter), insulated home. All built from the ground, literally. Watching this all take place and seeing the house take shape is so rewarding. We finished off the build with a candle ceremony, lighting successive candles in a spiral in the ground around the central support post of the house, to celebrate how everything in the house is connected to the Earth.

Paulina, the voluteer and workshop coordinator, said some really interesting things during the candle ceremony. She talked about how important it is to get into the dirt, get the Earth on your hands, your feet, your face, so that you can reconnect with it- and how cleansing getting dirty can be. It made me think how disconnected we are from getting dirty and that we think of dirt as a bad thing. I´ve been dirtier this week than ever in my life. My skin has taken on a dark shade with all the clay and earth that´s ground into it, regardless of the amount of scrubbing I do. But, I´ve also had a chance to see what you can create with Earth. It´s so, so incredible. It´s totally changed my perspective on natural building- thinking these buildings were only for warm climates with predictable weather- to thinking that this is something that is a possiblity. And the whole idea of making things from the rawest of materials, knowing exactly where they came from and exactly what they are made with, is fascinating to me. Don´t get me wrong- it´s a HUGE undertaking and we had the luxury of about 25 people to take this one (and the house is far from done). But, the other thing that Paulina pointed out is how this cooperative building project builds a house, as well as a community. In our case, this is defintely true. It´s pretty awesome to see a group of people come together and create something so functional and important out of clay and straw.