Mud and Straw Homes for Earthquake Regions

September 3, 2015

by: Marlene Dodinval, Friends of Lotan, originally published in Israel21c

Nepalese villagers now faced with massive rebuilding projects following [a devastating] earthquake could benefit from the lessons learned by eco-minded builders in Israel’s Arava desert. These southern Israeli builders have developed an earthquake-proof housing system that can be manufactured and constructed quickly by people without building experience.

Northwestern University Prof. Eric Masanet recently brought Alex Cicelsky of Kibbutz Lotan as a guest lecturer to his course on sustainable engineering to speak about the development work of the kibbutz’s Center for Creative Ecology (CfCE).

He pointed out that people living in traditional wood-framed multi-storied houses with earth-brick walls, or in clay houses suffered little more than cracked walls after earthquakes. However, families living in newer concrete apartments were doomed as the columns of these buildings were severed and roofs and floors pancaked on top of each other.

When Cicelsky and his building partner Mike Kaplin designed the student housing for the campus of the CfCE, they recognized they had two potentially contradictory design criteria—to be earthquake-proof and to have an extremely low environmental footprint.

Cicelsky and Kaplin found their solution in combining ancient Hebrew–Egyptian mud-and-straw construction with carbon-sequestering straw-bale construction and geodesic domes made famous by 20th century American architect Buckminster Fuller. Straw bales—a waste product of wheat production—are a locally available renewable resource and superb insulator. The mud-straw coating holds the bales together and makes them fireproof.

The elegant geodesic dome is manufactured by hand and constructed by students from simple steel pipe holds. Though the dome holds four tons, “When the earthquake shakes the earth, the domes may slide around like an upside-down bowl on a wobbly table, but they won’t collapse,” explains the designers. To read the complete article, go to www.israel21c.org/mud-and-straw-homes-could-be-answer-for-earthquake-regions

Source: Excerpt of article reprinted with permission, Israel21c

Photo Credit: Hannah Cohen/wikipedia.org