Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

94 Designing ecological Habitats
Each building
becomes a unique
creation, an
unreproducible work
of art appearing at an
unrepeatable juncture
of time and space.
Bricks and Blocks
A step up from the adobe earth brick is to include a greater percentage of
clay, and fire the bricks, turning the material into a kind of stone. By adding
cement and other materials, you can skip the firing and use the chemical
hardening process instead. Ordinary bricks are standard sized, but you still
need skill and experience to lay good walls.
Building blocks are typically much larger, and shaped for things like
corners, strengthening courses and door or window surrounds. Making your
own cement blocks is pretty easy. In the 1960s the Appropriate Technology
folks developed a lever operated press to make bricks from earth with a small
percentage of cement added. The Cinva Ram, as it is called, has decades of
experience behind it and tens of thousands of homes have been built with it.
Tiles and Pottery
Tiles for roofing can be made in the same way. Fired tiles are waterproof,
and will last for hundreds of years.
Glass
Some modern windows are very high tech, very expensive, and efficiently
minimise heat loss. At that end of the range, with aluminium alloy frames,
triple plated, vacuum spaced, possibly photo sensitive glass, you need to
consider the embodied energy and the processes that go into the components.
At the other end of the range, scavenging windows and frames from houses