Experience with Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks (CSEB)
Thursday, January 3, 2013
By Arch. Nabeela Nazir
In October, 2007 we considered building our house in Lahore where we had moved a couple of months earlier and it appeared that we were going to stay put for the foreseeable future.
I had always admired houses made of soil in its most natural form. Rammed earth, Wattle and daub, Adobe, Cob and CSEB seemed to me to belong to their surroundings as fired brick didn't. Urban and climatic constraints however rule many of these techniques out, except Rammed earth and CSEB.
Having worked with CSEB many years earlier in my days with the Aga Khan Network, I decided to give this medium a try once again. CSEB are compacted soil blocks produced in a specially designed manual press. The press is known as Cinva Ram and was first used in South America about 60 years ago. The basic component of these blocks is soil to which some amount of sand is added for its inert qualities. Depending on the overall soil composition and the type and amount of clay particles in it, it is stabilized with cement and/or lime to a ratio of 5-10% by volume. The dry mix is gently sprinkled with a little water and mixed with a fork. The water should be just enough to make a lump as you squeeze it in your hand. The process of compaction and stabilization together ensures that the block gains sufficient strength after proper curing and makes it equivalent to a kiln produced brick.
One could see endless examples of this medium from places in southwestern US like New Mexico etc. Closer to home in India too, with the Auroville Institute in the state of Tami Nadu, India, taking the technique various notches up. Contemporary examples in our immediate urban environment however, are hard to come by. My brief search for the same in Lahore was predictably unsuccessful, but I decided to go ahead nonetheless.
Some research later, which included the tests of soil samples from the site ( X-Ray Diffrected and Petrographic Modal analysis) at the New Campus Geology deptt, the hunt for a source of hydrated lime, locating the fellow in Karachi who had made the Block Press for us earlier, discussions with Auroville regarding the best block size for a small project and overall composition based on the type of soil I had available, and finally after consultation with the engineers, we designed a load bearing house in CSEB.
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posted by S A J Shirazi @ 9:00 AM,
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The Unacknowledged Conscience Of Twentieth Century Architecture
Monday, August 13, 2012
Hassan Fathy is one of the most important architects of the twentieth century, whose works have had a widespread influence on the architecture of the Islamic world and whose ideas have extended to the Western world. This paper focuses on the complexity of Fathy’s architecture and the richness and range of its theoretical intentions. It also assesses Fathy’s attitudes towards modernism and the International Style as well as the critical responses to his works and philosophy. The relationship of his philosophy to movements such as Postmodernism, community architecture and self-help building, ecoarchitecture and sustainability and tendencies such as neovernacular and earth building are also examined. The main objective of this paper is to reveals the significance of Fathy’s approach while placing him within the wider perspective of twentieth-century architecture
Index Terms—Architects, Criticism, Earth Architecture, Modern Architecture, Postmodern Architecture, Regionalism, Sustainability
Read the paper here
Labels: Earth Architecture
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 12:19 PM,
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Earth Architecture
Friday, March 9, 2012
Currently it is estimated that one half of the world’s population—approximately three billion people on six continents—lives or works in buildings constructed of earth. And while the vast legacy of traditional and vernacular earthen construction has been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the contemporary tradition of earth architecture. Author Ronald Rael, founder of Eartharchitecture.org provides a history of building with earth in the modern era, focusing particularly on projects constructed in the last few decades that use rammed earth, mud brick, compressed earth, cob, and several other interesting techniques. EARTH ARCHITECTURE presents a selection of more than 40 projects that exemplify new, creative uses of the oldest building material on the planet. {Via }
Labels: Earth Architecture
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 8:09 AM,
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Earth Architecture
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Investigating the intelligence of the low-tech earth architecture of the Sahara: A feasibility study from the western desert of Egypt
Labels: Earth Architecture
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 10:17 PM,
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