Let's Breathe Futuristics Buildings By Using Natural Materials

Relentless and chaotic, the two words that describe our lives currently. And while living like this, the buildings that we live and breathe in are the mirrors of it.

Sizes of the rooms have compacted, air to breathe is being widely distributed among more and more people, while we the population is growing anyway, and we are compromising the quality of life, why not build the buildings that would breathe.

We as humans always know the solution to our problems, yet we choose the easier options, faster options, because we have grown impatient, despite knowing the cons outweighing the pros of today’s construction methods, we choose to live in it and with it. But, there are several methods which can be used to construct a building in viable ways. Ways which are natural and do let us breathe and even the walls around us breathe with us.

The older methods to construct were purely out of the naturally available local materials. But with industrialization and globalization, the pace changes, the materials changed. But still, there are various options that can even be considered today for a healthier spaces and living conditions.

Rammed Earth construction

One of the most viable construction technology that can be faster as well as healthier is Rammed Earth Construction Method. This involves ramming of the dug-out earth for the foundation and construction. This construction usually boasts of load bearing walls and minimum material wastage and consumption. With the proper amount of earth, sand and water, it is one of the quicker construction methods that can be considered very well as the regular building method.

Rammed Earth Construction Process

Image credit: Flickr/Ben and Laura

Rammed Earth construction currently is widely used in various countries by many architects. It also gives a graceful look to the building, and its façade and with proper roofing can also withstand heavy rains.

Unlike the belief that earth construction cannot bear the rain-wash, the fact is the earth construction are quite stronger and are amiable to the changing environmental conditions.

Many naturally available materials tend to be more accustomed to the environment and its changing capacities than the more prominently used cement, or steel or glass. These materials do not let any sort of accustomed to nature for a building.

Shibam, Yemen, is a city with extreme temperatures which is built with Adobe (sun-dried earth bricks) standing from over centuries withstanding, giving a marvelous example of sustainability and construction in the right direction.

Shibam-Manhattan of The Desert

Image credit: Flickr

Cob Construction

Not only adobe and rammed earth but methods like cob construction, earthbag construction, wooden constructions (especially, cities which are earthquake prone), stone construction, limestone constructions, etc. are all very much in existence yet unacquainted.

Image creditL Flickr/Jeff harris

Earthbag Construction

Image credit: Flickr/Progressive Art

With intensive projects developing and coming up every day in the cities, compromising from our breathing space to our living spaces, it is high time to go back to what existed and exists mutually with earth and naturally available. Since many years now developers have glorified the materials which aren’t as ‘good’ as they are claimed. But, sadly they have become more conventional, yet there architects everywhere and every day trying to build sustainably and retrieve the environment, but there needs to be more awareness, more initiatives and progress to still retain what we can loose.