Moderator: coldharvest
nowonmai wrote:North of what?
redharen wrote:North of the 45th parallel.
I'm not really into that superadobe/earthbag construction stuff. It would be cool if you built something out of it in the desert, plastered it over, and made it look like Luke's folks' house on Tatooine. Actually I visited a place this weekend down South (29°59′7.79″N 35°5′17.87″E, to be specific, nowonmai) where they snap geodesic domes together out of metal frames and then layer them with straw bales and adobe. It was cool to see and could make for a nice place, but in the woods I think I'd go for something different.
If you read Lewis and Clark's description of their journey West and the earthen dwellings they saw in the Mandan villages, that's also along the lines of what I'm envisioning.
vagabond wrote:Ah...I guess from the pictures and your mention of the American Southwest I thought the superadobe thing might be worth a look.
The place 'down South' sounds pretty neat. I'm not sure what Jerusalem has in terms of architectural / design bookstores but there's quite a few books out there on sustainable and nature-built houses. With something as American-sounding and seeming as a hogan you might need to find some folks that still do that sort of work in the US and get in touch with them.
Neat project though. Best of luck.
redharen wrote:vagabond wrote:Ah...I guess from the pictures and your mention of the American Southwest I thought the superadobe thing might be worth a look.
The place 'down South' sounds pretty neat. I'm not sure what Jerusalem has in terms of architectural / design bookstores but there's quite a few books out there on sustainable and nature-built houses. With something as American-sounding and seeming as a hogan you might need to find some folks that still do that sort of work in the US and get in touch with them.
Neat project though. Best of luck.
Thanks, vagabond. There isn't as much material available here on this kind of construction, but there's quite a bit of it going on, especially in the Negev, which has always been sort of an experimental design/construction laboratory for Israel.
Ben-Gurion, you know, the country's first prime minister, said on numerous occasions that the future of Israel hinged on its ability to render the Negev a livable space for millions of people; "making the desert bloom" wasn't just a Zionist talking point, but a project of existential importance, since the desert takes up half of the country. And Ben-Gurion was willing to join the experimenters -- a lot of people don't realize that the prime minister of this country, while still in office, packed up one day, moved out of his house in Tel Aviv, and started running the government from a two-bedroom hut in the middle of the Negev, in a time when the desert still lacked modern infrastructure. Nation-building and strategic planning took place during the country's formative years in a building that housed little more than a bunch of books; a phone; a radio; and two pictures on the bedroom walls: Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi.
So yeah, learning by doing is a possibility here -- maybe not the exact construction methods I'd use back home, but at least some relevant skills. And you learn by seeing, too. The last couple of times I've been out researching trails I have gotten to see amazing examples of dry stone wall construction, some of it constructed in ancient times, and still standing in its original place after a couple of thousand years. The stone walls of agricultural terraces on hillsides around Jerusalem, the foundations of Arab villages destroyed during and after the 1948 war, and the retaining walls the Romans built on switchbacking footpaths ascending into the Judean Desert from the Dead Sea are all examples of an art that has been all but lost in an era of concrete walls and cut-limestone facades. Doubt I'd ever be able to duplicate that kind of stuff in my lifetime, especially from the kind of stone available on the property up North, but I would like to learn enough to at least make a humble attempt.
A buddy of mine here loaned me a couple of books, though, that are pretty cool -- Shelter by Lloyd Kahn, which is almost too weird to be useful, and its more mainstream sequel, Home Work. If you're interested in stuff like superadobe, earthbag, straw bale, rammed earth, recycled material construction, etc., then you'd probably enjoy those if you haven't read 'em already.
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