The Appropriate Technology Collaborative‘s 2012 visit to Guatemala brought 17 volunteers from around Michigan to Lake Atitlán, where they installed a solar electric system to power the computer lab at CECAP‘s vocational training centre in Santa Cruz La Laguna, and built an exterior wall out of bajareque at the nursery school of San Marcos La Laguna.
The problem – a neighbour’s land where the kids would escape!
The solution: a bajareque wall made from hardwood posts, bamboo, rocks, mud, natural rope and elbow grease!
Mixing the mud – many feet make light work.
Applying mud to the wall.
Applying the first layer of earthen plaster with a large wooden trowel.
Project finished! Our local team of natural builders – Juan, Noé, Ventura and Chepe.
And the whole crew – the volunteer team from the Appropriate Technology Collaborative
The whole project was a great success and we’re looking forward to making more such walls in the school and in other public spaces with future ATC volunteer teams. We hope to document the process so that others can copy the technique.
With the help of a pair of longer-term volunteers, this coming week we’ll be putting a small tin roof to keep the rain off, a lime and prickly-pear plaster to defend the bottom of the wall from raindrop splash-damage, and a clay plaster for the rest of it. I shall add photos as it happens.
To see more info and photos on the trip, check out the ATC blog by John Barrie, ATC’s founder and director, and also Tina’s blog.
Bambareque is a fusion of bamboo with the traditional bajareque buildings of the americas.
Bajareque is the wattle and daub of the americas – mud, sticks and stones combined to make simple one- and two-storey buildings. Its most endearing features are its low-cost, renewability, earthquake-resistance and ease of construction.
Cross-section of a bajareque wall from the western highlands of Guatemala
The combination of materials in bambareque is not original, but the name is. I built my first bambareque building – a composting toilet – in 2008, to see if it could add some of the benefits of building with bamboo to the excelent qualities of bajareque. It’s still in great shape and so, due to its use of a cheaper and more renewable resource and having better seismic resistance than traditional wood-framed bajareque, I think it deserves its own name.
In this area (western highlands of Guatemala), bajareque buildings are built by first assembling a frame of hardwood posts. A thin bamboo (Mexican weeping bamboo) is then strapped horizontally onto both sides of the uprights using wet agave fibre ties (aka maguey). Pine needles are draped from the bamboo before filling the cavity with rocks and a mix of mud and pine needles. The mud mix is then applied as an earthen plaster to seal and preserve the organic materials within.
Earthen plaster applied over a bajareque frame
I've yet to visit them but I have heard of 500-year-old bajareque buildings in Guatemala that are still standing, although most don't last that long. Before the 1960's, most rural dwellings in Guatemala were bajareque, then adobe took over until that too was superseded by reinforced concrete and cinder block. While block and adobe appear more substantial, and are generally more desirable to most rural Guatemalans, bajareque has superior resistance to earthquakes and it's also considerably cheaper. Ironically, bajareque has seen a revival among wealthier central americans for building their weekend homes, which are often finished to an exceptionally beautiful degree.
A typical bajareque house in El Salvador - note the bamboo rafters.
Replacing the wooden frame in bajareque with bamboo makes it even cheaper and more ecological. The main difference it makes to the building is due to the size of the bamboo - it's a lot thicker than the hardwood posts they usually use, which are normally three to four inches thick at most (8-10cm), whereas building-grade bamboo is about six inches in diameter (15cm). This creates a much larger cavity, and thus more work to fill it, but it also creates a more insulated wall.
Another difference is that bamboo doesn't like being buried in the ground, since it's more vulnerable to humidity, insects and fungal decay than the traditional hardwoods used for bajareque. The bamboo is pre-cured in borax and boric acid but the moisture in the soil will eventually leach that out. My original solution to this problem was to bury it in cement but I've since come up with several other lasting solutions:
(1) insert shortened hardwood posts soaked in burnt oil into the base of the bamboo uprights and insert the other end of the stick into the ground;
(2) bury large rocks into the ground (>60cm deep) leaving 10cm proud, glue rebar into them with epoxy, then bend the rebar into a hook, drop the bamboo onto the bar till it sits on the rock, and then fill the bamboo's base with cement;
(3) tie the bamboo to a reinforced concrete foundation and fill the base cavities with cement.
Four years later, I'm more convinced than ever that bambareque is a sound building method and hope soon to begin building a bambareque community refuge in San Marcos La Laguna, for families whose houses are at risk from from landslides during Guatemala's heavy rainy season. The venture is funded by The Appropriate Technology Collaborative, who is also bringing a team of volunteers to help build and document the design.
Another project currently underway is a bambareque cabin in The Yoga Forest, a retreat centre and edible forest garden in the hills above San Marcos La Laguna.
I love big rocks. Above all I love their sheer enormousness and immovability, reminding us puny humans how fragile and short-lived we are.
They’re great for building and one of the first structures I ever built was a staircase made from white rock slabs that had been ploughed out of a field. Moving and positioning them is tricky but once they’re in, they’re in and some fifteen years later my stairs haven’t budged an inch. This is my homage to big rocks and the buildings made with them.
We have plenty of big rocks where I live in Guatemala and they’re used a lot in buildings here: in walls, foundations, furniture and sculptures. We built a small amphitheatre for presentations at our centre (La Cambalacha) using rocks weighing up to 6 tonnes :
This is one of the smaller ones!
We had up to 20 helpers on the job – a tricky thing to manage as the potential for the inexperienced to crush a finger, toe, hand or limb is significant but, knock on wood, we’ve not had any serious incidents. Add to that the engineering problems of moving these boulders and you can either have a lot of fun or a lot of frustration!
Engineering big rocks is an ancient art form practised the world over, making it all the more surprising that so little is known about how they used to do it. Dynamite, diamond saws and diesel-powered excavators are used nowadays, but check out Wally Wallington’s techniques:
I’m curious to know if this is how Florida’s famed Coral Castle was put together – Edward Leedskalvin (1887-1951) built it in secret over 28 years – or if there’s any truth behind Leonard Nimoy’s speculations here:
These last two buildings involve moving rocks to make buildings, but there is another class of big rock buildings that involves keeping the rocks where they are to form part of the building. Below are some of my favourites.
This is Daniil Sihastrul’s monastic cell in Romania, which he excavated over 11 years in the 15th Century:
One of the many boulder houses in the village of Monsanto, Portugal:
The Monsanto houses probably inspired this two-storey house, which was built in 1974 between four boulders in the mountains of Fafe in Portugal:
This cave house is one the remains of England’s last troglodyte community, near Kinver Edge, Worcestershire, England:
And here is Matera, where Italy’s last troglodyte community lived, until Italy grew so embarrassed of it that in the 1960′s it was declared a “national disgrace”. The state ordered its evacuation but in 1993 it started becoming a trendy place to set up home and now real estate prices have gone through the roof!
Turkey’s Cappadocia region has countless dwellings carved from its rocks, including underground cities that were used as hiding places for early Christians (e.g. Kaymakli):
In 1998 I spent a month living in a monk’s cave house in Rewalsar, India, which was part of a Tibetan refugee community that lives in some 50 caves and cave-houses nearby the original cave where one of their favourite saints and heroes, Guru Padmasambhava, once made his love nest with the princess of Kangra.
The Tantric master who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century was born in Pakistan, but he stopped off in Rewalsar on his journey to Tibet to seduce the king’s daughter, Mandarava, who became his consort and travelled with him into the wilds of Tibet. He converted the locals to Buddhism after surviving the king’s attempt to burn him at the stake! My photographs are currently in a box 5,000 miles away in London, so here’s a picture of Padmasambhava in his cave temple.
Here’s one of my latest projects involving a very big rock: a one-room rock and concrete house that we built onto a very large rock indeed – the cliff face. All that cement isn’t very natural I know, but this is where we’re storing the equipment needed to build all the other much more natural cabins, compost toilets and a studio. We’re soon adding a bamboo and palm-thatch second storey, and an outdoor kitchen and dining area.
Although one saves materials from not having to build one of the walls, the time we saved was lost when we had to engineer solutions to the water that seeps through the walls. I’m glad we had a diamond-tipped cutting disc and one of my favourite tools: my reconditioned Milwaulkee Rotary Hammer, which plunges holes into rocks faster than you’d think possible if you’ve only ever used a normal hammer drill on concrete – click on the image to see the latest version on Amazon.
Not that I like breaking open or plunging holes into age-old rocks, but sometimes there is little option. According to Hinduism, spirits often identify themselves with rocks and mistakenly believe that they are the actual rock itself, and so masons will either say a small prayer before working on a rock or even, in the case of a larger rock, call for a puja or ceremony to release the spirit within. The priest informs the spirit of its metaphysical confusion, thus liberating it from the rock. Only then can work begin!
On that note, I’ll leave you with a photo of the Ellora cave temples in Maharashtra, India, which I visited in 2003. Built over a 300-year period, the 34 caves were excavated by competing Buddhist, Hindu and Jain sculptors. This is the Hindu Kailash Temple.
I’d love to hear of any other interesting big rock buildings – just add a comment with the link, thank you.
I’ve spent the last seven weeks hiding out in my office and slowly building my course website while Guatemala’s October rain pours and pours outside. I’ve also been making regular visits to my jobsites up the mountain – two constructions and one food forest – whenever I’m needed or the rain lets up to allow me to go.
But mostly I’ve been on the computer, coding HTML, photoshopping pictures, uploading web albums, and figuring out all this newfangled social networking that I’ve avoided very succesfully for the past seven years since I moved to Guatemala.
They call this being sociable nowadays!
I think often of the irony of how much time one has to spend in an office to go back to nature these days, but while I loathe the repetitive strain injury I’m developing in my mouse hand, and try in vain to slow my slide towards excessive caffeine dependency, I’m still fascinated by all this technology and the connectedness that it’s achieving between us humans.
I’ve doubled my number of facebook friends (it’s eery how the friend finder can dig into my past much better than I can!), started my first blog (yep, this is it!), published my sixth website, and reconnected with the outside world again. What strikes me the most is how the Internet is finally beginning to be used as an effective political tool by resistance and lobbying movements – witness the Arab uprisings, the Occupy Wall Street campaigners and the success of Avaaz. I just hope that the satellites don’t fall from their orbits just yet and that this unprecedented freedom of communication continues long enough for us to figure out how to manage and sustain ourselves and this extraordinary planet we live on.
So, while I still can, I shall launch my course website and cross my fingers that these modern tools can help me connect with enough people who want to rediscover the ancient human arts of building with natural materials and gardening the forests – so please help me by sharing this blog and the website with people you think will be interested – a big thank you
A final, shameless plug of my website – just click’n'go!
It’s uncanny how often dreams come true, and yet rarely in the way one imagined.
I was born and raised in London and, like many city-dwellers, I dreamed of acquiring a piece of land somewhere in the countryside where I could build a house, plant fruit trees and raise a family. All of these came suddenly true overnight seven years ago when I met my wife, who already had an eighteen-month-old son, a wooden house that she’d built, and several fruit trees growing in her garden up a valley in a Guatemalan village.
And then suddenly I was living under an avocado tree with wife and child!
But the land wasn’t big enough for my ambitions, besides which its primary function is as a workshop space for my wife’s arts education project (La Cambalacha in San Marcos La Laguna, on Lake Atitlán). I tinkered a little with our vegetable garden but the bugs here are voracious and the heavy rains wash out the soil in no time, which made for a lot of frustrating battles with mother nature as she taught me what didn’t work. Besides, I have always been more interested in trees – less effort for more food . We do have a few fruit trees (avocado, lemon, banana, jocote) but almost all other varieties get ravaged by our young students – I never got a look-in on the passion-fruit vine that we planted!
La Cambalacha – my wife founded this arts education project in 2003 and it’s still going strong.
My desire for more land intensified when I met Forest, yes, Forest, a young man who farms a huge chunk of rainforest that he bought for not very much in neighbouring Belize. He told me stories of his many-acred wonderland and all the food it provides. I could hardly complain about my lot but our garden didn’t quite fulfill my Tarzan fantasy.
Soon after Forest, I met Hayley, a volunteer at La Cambalacha. She liked this place so much that she bought a piece of land right next to ours and spent the next year and a half building her first house, from bamboo, with me as the building contractor – she’s a great boss and helped make the construction project both fun and creative, as it should be.
My first big bamboo project – Casa Hayley
Hayley works hard as a chef on boats, which earned her enough to buy a second, much larger piece of land, called Sha’baj, further up in the valley where we live – it has spectacular views and several waterfalls cascading over enormous rocks. Then she showed me Geoff Lawton’s fabulous Food Forest DVD and asked me to supervise the conversion of her land into a food forest, as well as building cabins and a yoga studio for courses that she’ll run there once she’s retired from being a boat-chef.
I was thrilled at the prospect and realized again that my dream was coming true. Of course it’s not my land, but Hayley has a generous spirit and never fails to share the fruits of the forest. If only more landowners were similarly inclined: so many outsiders (like me) who have moved into this village have erected huge concrete walls with razor wire and alarm systems, which only serve to alienate us johnny-come-latelies yet further from the local Mayan population – the original stewards of this land.
Sha’baj – The Forest Garden
I’ve been working part-time on the land for a year now, mostly supervising my green-fingered friend Andrés Puzul (see photo below) with the gardening and landscaping; and Vicente Ixcaya’s talented building team, which is responsible for the first construction: a simple strong room for storing tools while we develop the site. I visited the land again today and felt more inspired than ever with the project, a curious melding of two people’s dreams that I hope will inspire many more to do something similar.
Andrés and a fine head of bok choy
Today we also ate our first huge lettuce from the land and by pure coincidence I started this blog to document and share the development of both (a) my passions – natural building and forest gardening – and (b) Sha’baj, which is to be the guinea pig for my experimentations. Join me as I learn, and if you’re interested in finding the forest too, come lend a hand here some day.
I’ve been on the blog rollercoaster this week. First I soared into the blogosphere with my new blog on blogger, (or do I mean blogspot?) and happily began receiving likes, shares and comments on facebook, then suddenly it was removed without warning, and so I bought my own domain (http://www.returntotheforest.org)and somewhat wearily reassembled the blog on my own domain, and then, lo and behold, it was back as if nothing had ever happened!
My old, new blog’s back!
So I made a final post on that one telling people to come over to this one, and now here we are, phew!
Now I can get on with blogging about a rather more relevant adventure – natural building and forest gardening. See you on the next post!
As you can probably tell there’s not much to see here yet. I’m still building it as of two days ago, when blogspot removed my first blog without any warning and precious little explanation!
I suspect it was because I’d originally hosted this course website at a free hosting service that, unknown to me, had developed a reputation for being “spammy”. Both facebook and Gmail had also rejected the link for the same reason.
So, lesson learnt, I bought my very own domain name: www.returntotheforest.org Hurrah!
This means I can safely host my blog here, and no-one can take it down without my say so! It also means that my website is a lot safer, unique and totally free of any spammyness.
Having lost well over a week’s worth of work, I’m almost back at the same point I was before, only now I’ve learnt a few lessons about the Internet and also the basics of the “pro” blogging platform, WordPress. Truth be told, I prefered working with blogger/blogspot – it’s a lot easier to play with – but it’s unsettling knowing that blogspot (which is owned by Google) can just swish it all away in the blink of an eye.
So if you write a blog that you don’t host yourself, then make sure you backup your blog so you have your own copy of all your hard work – and be careful not to link to a spammy domain name like I did.
Very soon I’ll archive this blog somewhere else and start writing about its intended subjects: forest gardening and natural building. So please come back soon and there’ll be some interesting on-topic posts to read. Meanwhile, click here to see some of the many plants we’re growing up at the forest garden site.
Earthen plaster applied over a bajareque frame
A typical bajareque house in El Salvador - note the bamboo rafters.
And then suddenly I was living under an avocado tree with wife and child!
. We do have a few fruit trees (avocado, lemon, banana, jocote) but almost all other varieties get ravaged by our young students – I never got a look-in on the passion-fruit vine that we planted!
La Cambalacha – my wife founded this arts education project in 2003 and it’s still going strong.
My first big bamboo project – Casa Hayley
Andrés and a fine head of bok choy
My old, new blog’s back!
