New book

"Building with Earth - A Guide to Flexible-Form Earthbag Construction" By Paulina Wojciechowska

A comprehensive guide to building with earthbags
(earth filled bags/sandbags). It also describes:

• Methods of building without using any clay
  or wood, concrete or steel.
• Constructing domes, vaults and arches as
  well as ideas on other types of roofs.
• The basic principles of building with earth
  when clay is present.
• Several ways to create beautiful and durable earth finishes.
• Lime based plasters for weather protection.
• Shows how to plan your own earthen dwelling.
• Contains many resources on ecological construction

• paper 8x10 200 pages
• 180 illustrations
• 100 b&w photos
• ISBN 1-890132-81-0
• $24.95
• Chelsea Green Publishing

“This informative book on earth construction demonstrates how to build a structure, cheaply and robustly with earth using the earthbag technique. Paulina, using excellent illustrations and photographs, details every step of the process from design of the walls, buttresses, foundations and roofing, to the particularities of setting out the building on site, and its construction. Because mud is a material vulnerable to attack from water it is essential to get all the important details correct.

It is fascinating to see the ancient arts of clay puddling and gravel back-filling revived in this quite new building system that uses either hessian, burlap or polypropylene bags filled with the mixed with water and often with cement or lime. Rows of these bags are gradually elevated on top of each other and tamped into place, with lines of barbed wire between them to fix one row onto the other.

The resulting walls, domes and vaults have remarkable organic forms that are topped off with roofs finished with grasses, patties, shingles or more conventional timber trusses and tiles. What is very interesting is to see new designers reinventing mud features, like the exterior mud bench, that I have excavated 6000 year old examples of in Mesopotamia where later scribes called them ‘kisu’ in cuneiform tablets written in over 4500 years ago. Perhaps what we see described in Paulina’s book is actually a building construction system of the future, as well as one of the past. If so it is fortunate we have such a comprehensive ‘how to’ manual for the mudbag builders of tomorrow.

This is a delightful book and has lots of lessons on the basic construction that apply to many building types, not just those of flexible-form earthbag construction.”

By Professor Susan Roaf (author of the book: “Ecohouse – A design Guide”)
Energy-Efficiency Building Programme, Oxford Brookes University