Publication release: Raw Earth!

Building with earth still has enormous potential in so many places around the world. It can be an integral solution to the combined challenges of climate change, urban expansion and affordable housing. Our experience in designing and building with earth has deep roots. Now, after years of learning by doing, we have brought it all together in one systematic overview: from design to production phase and from sampling soils to layering fault roofs, Raw Earth as A Construction Material carefully explains how to do it. Richly illustrated with examples from our projects in Mali and Mauritania. Useful both as a handbook for higher practical education and as a state of the art manual for professional designers and builders. The book is currently available in English. A French version follows this Spring.

You can order the book by sending an email to raw-earth@levs.nl. The price is € 30 + shipping costs.

There is a big library with a lot of books on building with earth, rammed earth, building techniques etc. A lot of them are in French, some of them are English. Most of these publications are quite technical and based on European/Western standards and way of building and conceiving the built environment. The idea of the book is simple: to spread the knowledge of building with raw earth and with CEBs in a direct and understandable way. The main message is: ‘Learning by doing’.

One of the first barriers in the use of earth is its negative connotation as a poor building material which must be refurbished after a short time. Over the last decades, CEBs technology has seen continuous substantial improvements. Thanks to this, today it is possible to demonstrate the grand potential of raw earth as a construction material and to allow more and more people to start building effectively with it.

I believe that building with CEBs is a way to go today and for the future and this publication is just the start. I hope this book will be a useful tool for generations of students, architects, builders and any person dreaming of a better way of building and living in our environment.

[Jurriaan van Stigt]