Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/26/award-winning-architect-designs-a-mud-and-bamboo-building.html
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The video was a bit disconcerting. I was expecting something between “here we are starting work on it” and “here’s the finished building.” I’m quite curious about the process here*. It’s a beautiful building, anyways.
*Though this video shows some of it, though not the actual wall construction:
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The walls are so uniform they have the appearance of rammed earth, but the mode of construction is obviously cob. It does make me think that formwork has been used but traditional rammed earth would employ a much dryer mixture. Then there is that flourish of straw or rushes on the top of some walls - but not others - so I am getting the feeling that that has just been dumped on freshly made walls so that it allows the walls to dry more uniformly and avoids cracks (or possibly keeps the edge fresh if there is to be an increase in wall height. Pure conjecture on my part. I have never seen anyone shave the walls in the way depicted and it strikes me as barely possible that the walls were formed by just dumping layers of cob and then shaving them flat. Is it even possible to make it that flat?
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That’s my guess from the video - pile it up, chop sides flat, repeat. Some of the seams between layers were noticeable during that end walkaround - Log cabins and stone castles were largely eye/hand-fit piece by piece from what I’ve seen on various documentary and reenactment films, why not flattening adobe walls? (though I didn’t notice any obvious plumb lines hanging)
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Yeah, I guess what we see at 33-43 seconds in, just slapping some cob (that’s heavy with long pieces of straw) on top and then shaving it flat, is the process. Wild. I kept expecting some extra structural support beyond the bamboo used in the ramp on the exterior of the building (and the pillars supporting it), but I tend to forget that people make even 10 story buildings entirely out of mud.
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Yes the mixture seems to fit the idea of cob but there is much less straw in it than can be seen above the walls and that simply looks like straw - it doesn’t seem to have mud attached. Slightly mysterious. I have viewed a couple more of her vids and of one of her German colleagues and I am tending to think that it is rammed earth and we just have not been shown the forms.
I think the cob they’re slapping on top of the walls is lumpy enough that it gives the illusion of having more straw than it does - it ends up looking like thatch to me - but it’s mostly lumpy mud the same color as the straw. Rather than carefully shaping the wall as they add it, they are adding a bunch of excess and then cutting it off to shape the wall after. You can see all the trimmings at the bottom of the smoothed walls. I’ve never heard of this process before, but that does seem to be what’s going on.
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