rammed earth – Page 3 – EARTH ARCHITECTURE

January 23, 2011

Wood Marsh Architects Designs Rammed Earth House

Photography by Jean Luc Laloux

Designed by Wood Marsh Architects, this monumental new home in the small town of Merricks overlooks vineyards and Victoria’s Port Phillip Bay. Featuring rammed earth walls, which form the home’s central spine, their design forms shelter against the often harsh coastal environment.

Photography by Jean Luc Laloux

Intended primarily as a holiday and weekend residence, the brief was for a family home that would stand up to the local conditions, requiring little or no maintenance. The client was also keen to ensure that parts of the house could be used, as well as the whole, and as a result discrete openings appear in the central corridor.

UPDATE: Nanjing Museum of Art & Architecture: NOT Black Rammed Earth

original project description from the StevenHoll.com website

UPDATE: while the StevenHoll.com website states that “The museum is formed by a “field” of parallel perspective spaces and garden walls in black rammed earth over which a light “figure” hovers”, unfortunately I have been informed by the Press Manager at Steven Holl architects that the walls are not black rammed earth, but bamboo formed concrete.

The new museum is sited at the gateway to the Contemporary International Practical Exhibition of Architecture in the lush green landscape of the Pearl Spring near Nanjing, China. The museum explores the shifting viewpoints, layers of space, expanses of mist and water, which characterize the deep alternating spatial mysteries of the composition of Chinese painting.

The museum is formed by a “field” of parallel perspective spaces and garden walls in black rammed earth over which a light “figure” hovers. The straight passages on the ground level gradually turn into the winding passage of the figure above. The upper gallery, suspended high in the air, unwraps in a clockwise turning sequence and culminates at “in-position” viewing of the city of Nanjing in the distance. This visual axis creates a linkage back to the great Ming Dynasty capital city. Learn more at the Steven Holl Architects website.

January 17, 2011

Australian Research Council Funds Rammed Earth

Rammed earth may be a future building material in north-west Indigenous communities if a study at The University of Western Australia proves successful. A three-year Australian Research Council Linkage Project worth more than $200,000 has been awarded to UWA researchers to evaluate rammed earth housing and to determine national engineering and construction guidelines.

January 8, 2011

Holy Cross Church Restored

Church of the Holy Cross, also known as the Holy Cross Episcopal Church, is an historic church in Stateburg, in the High Hills of Santee near Sumter, South Carolina. It is located on land donated earlier by General Thomas Sumter, a resident of Stateburg, and its walls were constructed of rammed earth. Its 2-foot-thick walls were erected in 1852 by using wooden forms to hold local clay as laborers, probably slaves, tamped it down with a special tool, forcing out the water.

Dr. W.W. Alexander, head of the church’s 19th century building committee at the time, had been experimenting successfully with this construction method at his plantation home just across the highway. While the center section is 18th century wooden construction, the two wings were built of rammed earth, or Pise de Terre.

The Church of Holy Cross needed a significant renovation after termites were discovered in the sacristy in 2001. The $1.6 million restoration, paid for in part with a $250,000 Save America’s Treasures grant, replaced major sections of the termite-damaged trusses and roof panels, as well as the floor panels.

December 2, 2010

Casa Sanitas

Designed by Pyatt Studio, Casa Sanitas is the first rammed earth house to be constructed in the city of Boulder, Colorado and incorporates an insulated rammed earth enclosure appropriate for the Colorado Front Range climate.

November 22, 2010

Piscina Municipal de Toro

Photo: Héctor Santos-Díez

Vier Arquitectos, comprised of Antonio Raya, Christopher Crespo, Santiago Sánchez and Enrique Antelo, are the designers a municipal swimming pool in Toro (Zamora), Spain. A unique quality of the facility is that its exterior walls have been constructed of rammed earth, a traditional technique updated on a contemporary building typology.

Photo: Héctor Santos-Díez

The building, comprising three volumes, two for dressing and one more for the pool’s, supporting thermal collectors used to heat the pool water and showers, and extra water from the cleaning process, which is stored in a reservoir and reused in irrigating the landscape.

Photo: Héctor Santos-Díez

Low-energy materials were used throughout and the design for the pool received the first prize for ex eaquo de Edificación Sostenible in Castilla y Leon in its first edition.

Photo: Héctor Santos-Díez

November 18, 2010

Earth House by Jolson Architecture Interiors

Constructed primarily in rammed earth using local Dromana crushed rock, the Earth House, designed by Jolson Architecture Interiors, is a 465 sqm 4 bedroom residence that seemingly rises from the landscape and cranks to capture the sweeping rural and coastal panoramic views.

The western elevation consists of solid rammed earth walls without penetrations, designed as thermal banks capturing the afternoon sun. The eastern elevation is glazed to siphon dominant views inside. Designed around a large enclosed courtyard that provides protection from the strong winds, this outdoor room allows northern sunlight to filter into the main living areas.

Greenhouse Atelier

The Greenhouse Atelier, designed by al bordE, in Machachi, Ecuador is a shelter designed to express the powerful reflection of nature in the client’s paintings. The atelier is a “bubble” suspended between stone walls and rammed earth.

The existing space between walls, ground and bubble, protect the space from absorbing the humidity of the moorland. Additionally the first sun rays heat a radiator system that increase the temperature of the air gap. This heated air enters the space making it thermally comfortable. In the afternoon the main façade absorbs the sun heat, saving it in the solid floor of the workshop releasing the heat during the night.

[ More at Arch Daily ]

November 3, 2010

Brittlebush

Brittlebush is an experimental Desert Dwelling designed by Simón de Agüero, a recent graduate of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Taliesin, Arizona. The open-air living space incorporates tensile fabric structures into its design to shelter occupants from the sun. A fireplace provides winter heating.

The majority of the material used for Brittlebush were recovered or found on site: 90% of the steel was salvaged from the school scrap yard, all of the wood used for the formwork was waste from a local renovation project, and the earth used for the walls was from on-site.

Read more at [ designboom | boiteaoutils | treehugger ]

October 6, 2010

Tidal Resonance Chamber

As the first rammed-earth construct in the City of Tacoma, The Tidal Resonance Chamber provides a contemplative and relaxation space for users of the Center for Urban Waters (a LEED Platinum Marine research and analysis facility) . Aimed at serving as an instrument for perceptual synchronize with the natural rhythms of Commencement Bay, the chamber’s thick insulated earthen walls buffer out the heavy industrial sounds of the surrounding Port of Tacoma, and through a series of feed back pump operations the chamber’s water level mirrors that of the Thea Foss Waterway manifesting as a ratio-reduction.

Designed by Robert Horner, the Tidal Resonance Chamber’s main interior space has a trapezoidal footprint roughly 12’ x 18’. The fortified rammed-earth walls measure 8’6” in height, and rest atop a concrete foundation that measures 4’ in height. The chamber has a maximum filling capacity of 2500 gallons, which will fill at the highest of high tides. The interior of the chamber is filled with reclaimed granite curb fragments, river stones and will eventually populate with micro-organisms, barnacles and other aquatic lifeforms.