Natural Homes: techniques, solutions and beautiful images

[Billy]

I found this today and I am very impressed

3D printed houses constructed with locally sourced clay.
https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studi...77MLNafZIQo_Bc

The TECLA prototype house in fall 2020.

Sustainable 3D-printed prototype house in Italy is made from locally-sourced clay

Originating from a collaboration between architect Mario Cucinella and 3D-printer manufacturer WASP, TECLA is a prototype eco-house built near Ravenna, northern Italy, entirely made by 3D-printing a material based on locally-sourced clay.

TECLA (an acronym which stands for “Technology and Clay”) is a habitat consisting of two interconnected housing units, each covered by a semi-spherical dome.
The units have been built using multiple Crane Wasp printing units operating simultaneously. Crane WASP is defined by the manufacturer as “a collaborative 3D printing system capable of printing houses” and can print various materials – such as earth-based materials, concrete mortar, and geopolymers – with a maximum speed of 300 mm/s and a maximum printing area of 50 sqm per unit.

The design of the habitat features two or more “cocoon-like” housing units, whose shape vaguely resembles that of a sea urchin, in which structure, insulation, and finishes coincide.
The thick raw earth walls of the units have a hollow structure consisting of several clay “waves”, which makes them at the same time relatively lightweight, resistant, and highly insulating.
About 200 printing hours are required to build each unit, which consists of 350 clay layers, each 12 mm thick.

Read more via link.

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[meat suit]

Super cool!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=w9sXqxccRPM

[Karen (Geophyz)]

3D printed houses constructed with locally sourced clay.
https://inexhibit.com/case-studies/s...y-sourced-clay

What a interesting and useful idea. I am afraid I would not be able to live in one due to the lack of windows. But this might be a plus, especially if you could duplicate it on Mars or another planet. I am afraid I also need corners (where will I stand when I have been bad!). That is an odd thing, lack of corner phobia! But these house are especially pleasing to look at and a great idea.

[Constance]

Posted by Karen (Geophyz) (here)
3D printed houses constructed with locally sourced clay.
https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studi...77MLNafZIQo_Bc

What a interesting and useful idea. I am afraid I would not be able to live in one due to the lack of windows. But this might be a plus, especially if you could duplicate it on Mars or another planet. I am afraid I also need corners (where will I stand when I have been bad!). That is an odd thing, lack of corner phobia! But these house are especially pleasing to look at and a great idea.

Hey! Great to see you posting here

The link doesn't work, was it the WASP mud home you were referring to?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jo0QADF_xKc

[Constance]

Fence weaving via willow canes

[Ewan]

Bit of a here but the following is quite simply astonishing...

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mUKRPoQKynk

2,483,432 views Jun 11, 2023

During the California heat wave of 1906, Baldassare Forestiere dug a home underground with just a pickax and shovel. He spent 40 years excavating 10 acres of rooms, tunnels, a chapel, an underground aquarium, and courtyards to experiment with underground farming.

With no budget, he mixed mortar from the dirt he dug out, creating his own concrete and bricks. Despite continuing to work as a day laborer during the day (mostly digging irrigation ditches), by the 1920s, he had completed about 50 subterranean rooms.

A Sicilian immigrant to Fresno, California, Forestiere had planned to farm citrus until discovering that his 80 acres of “hardpan” soil were unusable for planting. Digging as far as 20 feet below the surface, Forestiere reached depths where the soil was good, and his trees were protected from Fresno’s extreme summer heat and winter frosts. After about 20 years of digging and underground farming, he could quit his day job and live off the fruits of his subterranean orchards.

Despite having just a fourth-grade education and no architectural training, Forestiere - inspired by the catacombs of Rome - built arches for support, and to this day, none of his underground construction has collapsed. In areas where he wanted more natural cooling (like near stoves), he created cone-shaped openings to encourage the venturi effect, pushing the hot air out and sucking the cooler air down.

His underground home had a kitchen with a wood-burning stove, an ice box and a dining room, winter and summer bedrooms, many skylights, a subterranean fish pond, a car garage for guests, and a three-floor aquarium with an underground glass viewing area. He had plans to open an underground resort to the public as a place to cool off in the summer, but he died before it was completed. His brother and family took over the site, and today it’s open to the public.

[Ewan]

And, to me, another astonishing feat..

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=03jgK_9aWoM

878,620 views Apr 11, 2022

Dwight Streamfellow was a college junior when he bought a piece of cheap river-front land to start a homestead. He was a city boy (partly in Washington DC where his father was a senator) so he planned to learn-by-doing on how raw land in the rugged mountains of Northern California’s Six Rivers National Forest.

The property cost him only $11,000 back in 1976, but soon he had built his own home (much of it with hand tools) and was growing his own food, pumping water from the river to irrigate his garden & orchard, and powering his homestead with photovoltaic and firewood (for heat and his hot tub/bathtub).

In a state that is drying up, Streamfellow considers his large chunk of riverfront his true wealth: he’s on the South Fork of the Trinity River, the longest un-dammed river left in California. Forty-five years ago he tried harvesting the water by carrying 5 gallon buckets up the 150 feet from the river to his home. He then tried a pedal-powered pump, but the calories burned weren’t replaced by the calories created in the garden. He finally perfected a system - an electric pump that is powered by a photovoltaic array - which provides all the water he, and his tenants, need for large gardens, orchards and the five homes on this property.

Starting before the Internet, Streamfellow felt he was without an instruction manual for most of his nearly 5 decades working the land, doing everything from building roads (chipping away at granite), creating garden terraces along his steep property and building up hugelkultur beds to garden on bedrock.

Now 68 years old, Streamfellow isn’t wealthy, but he has no debt (he believes in the pay-as-you-go model) and he considers himself wealthy from what his land provides; he has four tenants (who often work the property in lieu of rent), a garden that supplies sufficient annual fruit, vegetables and potatoes, and chickens, pigs and deer for meat. "It was always my goal to be as self-sufficient as possible,” explains Streamfellow. Forty-five years after settling here he says he always has a year’s worth of food and three year’s worth of firewood: "to me that's what represents wealth– that food and the capability to heat my home".

It is interesting how often he mentions wealth, he really understands what wealth is and it has nothing to do with that fake construct called money.