Building the Hogan

I’ve lived in many different houses in my life but they all share one thing in common - they were built by somebody else.  I’ve adapted myself and my lifestyle to the somewhat limited vision of architects, designers and builders who were more interested in selling a house and making a profit than building a home.

This time it will be different.  This time the entire process, from pillar to post, will be ours.  We chose the land, we’ve begun to clear it, made our driveway, planted some trees and learned quite a bit about this place we intend to call home. 

We decided early in the process that our home would be built as much as possible with local materials.  This is one of our highest priorities.  Sustainable living means minimizing your impact on the earth and one of the best ways to do that is to avoid products that require extensive resources, processing and transportation.

As I mentioned in the previous post, we had first decided to build with cob, but for a variety of reasons I detailed there we learned that it would not be the best choice for Taos.  In the course of my research of sustainable building materials over the last 18 months I came across a little known (outside the sustainable building industry that is) construction technique known as Earthbag building.

Earthbag building owes its current popularity to a man named Nader Khalili, who founded Calearth.org over 20 years ago.  It was Khalili’s vision that people around the world should be able to build small, comfortable and sustainable dwellings on their own land - using little more than the dirt under their feet.  Khalili even caught the attention of the United Nations with his emergency shelter design, intended for refugees or those afffected by large natural disasters.

Nader Khalili died last year at the age of 71, and the mantle has been passed to a variety of visionary pioneers such as Kelly Hart of Green Home Building, Owen Gieger of Earthbag Building and Kaki Hunter and Doni Kiffmeyer of OKOKOK.  They all carry on the vision of a low-cost, sustainable owner-built home as a way we can simultaneously reduce our personal impact while at the same time free ourselves from the debt lifestyle mandated by the corporate-backed housing industry.

Social goals aside, I discovered that Earthbag building combined the best features in what we wanted to get out of building our own home.  Here are a few of those things.

Earthbag building allows us to self-build.  First and foremost we required a technique that would be easy enough for Cecilia and I to do most of the labor - if necessary.  Earthbag homes can be built by two or three people, with the primary labor going to filling bags with the soil mixture and tamping the bags into place on the walls.  After seeing the technique in practice I was certain it was something we could both handle.

Earthbag allows us to use local materials.The combination of clay soil, sand and water are all available to us on our property or within 15 miles driving distance.  We’ve decided to incorporate scoria into the bag mixture in order to provide greater insulating properties than are otherwise possible with only soil. 

Earthbag building is fast.  We’ve heard the stories of the abandoned earthen houses that dot the southwest and we didn’t want to be one of the statistics.  We realized that we have to be able to see the end of the project in a reasonable amount of time so that self-building was practical.  For all intents and purposes Earthbag can be built as fast as you’re willing to make it.  We’re not afraid to work hard and we’re happy when we aren’t slowed by the process.

Earthbag building is flexible.  Since we’re building a Hogan, and the shape is octagonal, we need a building system that won’t constrict us in anyway, or add significant cost for our “artistic” choices.  With Earthbag, you actually improve the strength of the building by going round.  In addition, we can easily combine Earthbag building with cob in places that we want to be more free - as with benches and other built-in furniture.

Earthbag building is solar friendly.  Living in an off-grid community we are depending on the design of our house to reduce the necessity of conventional heating and cooling systems.  The thermal mass provided by the earthen walls, combined with our solar orientation and trombe wall, should limit the heating fuel to small amounts of wood or possibly gas.

Finally, Earthbag just “feels right”.  There’s something to be said for intuitive knowledge when it comes to chosing materials.  Everybody has had the experience of walking into a house and sensing that the house has a great, positive energy.  We currently live in an adobe house, so we know how it feels to live inside earthen walls.  It’s a feeling that neither of us had experienced before.  The thick, smooth, curved walls of our current house provide a psychic boost that isn’t measurable.  To put it in simple terms, it makes us feel good.

We intend to produce the same effect within our own (albeit rounder) walls made of clay, sand and stone.  We’d love to hear your experiences of living inside an earthen home, especially if you’ve chosen to build with Earthbags.