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Home & Interior Design books:
Earthbag Building: The Tools, Tricks and Techniques (Natural Building Series)

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Over 70 percent of Americans cannot afford to own a code-enforced, contractor-built home. This has led to widespread interest in using natural materials-straw, cob, and earth-for building homes and other buildings that are inexpensive, and that rely largely on labor rather than expensive and often environmentally-damaging outsourced materials.

Earthbag Building is the first comprehensive guide to all the tools, tricks, and techniques for building with bags filled with earth-or earthbags. Having been introduced to sandbag construction by the renowned Nader Khalili in 1993, the authors developed this "Flexible Form Rammed Earth Technique" over the last decade. A reliable method for constructing homes, outbuildings, garden walls and much more, this enduring, tree-free architecture can also be used to create arched and domed structures of great beauty-in any region, and at home, in developing countries, or in emergency relief work.

This profusely illustrated guide first discusses the many merits of earthbag construction, and then leads the reader through the key elements of an earthbag building:
Special design considerations
Foundations, walls and floors
Electrical, plumbing and shelving
Lintels, windows and door installations
Roofs, arches and domes
Exterior and interior plasters.

With dedicated sections on costs, making your own specialized tools, and building code considerations, as well as a complete resources guide, Earthbag Building is the long-awaited, definitive guide to this uniquely pleasing construction style.

Kaki Hunter and Donald Kiffmeyer have been involved in the construction industry for the last 20 years, specializing in affordable, low-tech, low-impact building methods that are as natural as possible. They developed the "Flexible Form Rammed Earth Technique" of building affordably with earthbags and have taught the subject and contributed their expertise to several books and journals on natural building.

Excellent resource -
This is our "go-to" book for very practical descriptions and diagrams of process and procedure. We are planning our new house, and are incorporating elements of off-grid solar/wind power, rainfall catchment, passive ventilation, and high-mass wall construction.

Nothing beats a hands-on experience, and if you can visit either the CalEarth site in California, or the Earthships site in New Mexico, you should. You get a much better understanding of the process of earthbuilding, and also of the finished product. Then, as you begin to plan to build, gather all the information you can. "Ceramic Houses" will give you great information on design principles and on philosophy; the Earthship books by Mike Reynolds give primo information on the plumbing and electrical systems, and in particular on rainfall catchment.

"Earthbag Building" however, remains our mainstay. Hunter gives such good detail, and provides excellent resource lists for materials, and also lovely line diagrams that are very clear and easy to follow. And to truly make her the Queen of Bag Building, if you e-mail her a reasonable question, she answers!

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Earthbag Building -
I first checked this book out in the local library. It's a wealth of information, so I went to Amazon and bought two copies. I can recommend it highly to anyone interested in exploring this form of construction.

Valuable tool -
This is a must book for anyone who is considering to undertake the task of building an earthbag structure. There are many tips and suggestions, the result of long practical experience, that will help the inexperienced builder to avoid many: "if I only had thought of this earlier..." moments.

An exciting new building method -
Earthbag building, a method developped by Nader Khalili, is a wonderful innovation in building. It means that a building be built from materials found on site, even if those materials are too poor for rammed earth or mud brick. I've already used the techniques in this book to detail two public buildings! The trick is now to convince the structural engineer and councils...

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Detailed, and well-written. -
This book makes a good gift to those who are planning or are fascinated by alternative house building.