Projects

Private house

This house was commisioned by the pioneering passive solar architect Mick Pearce in 1997. The site was a very exposed and windy hillside in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, overlooking Mozambique. With the great batholith behind it was important to place the house where it would not be in shade. The remoteness of the site meant all the major elements had to be locally sourced. The earth for the walls was dug from the building footprint. This allowed the house to be semi-sunken, which both took it out of the wind and made a sun trap courtyard. This ability to use the material on site and do something creative with the resulting hole are key advantages to rammed earth which make it more not less affordable.

After the top soil was removed to make a protective bund above the site, directing rain water runoff away from the courtyard and building the subsoil was piled outside of the building footprint. Work was directed by Nhamo Chasakara, who hired local labour and oversaw the whole build. Using formwork hired and brought from the capital three circular interconnecting rooms where quickly built with a team assembled from scratch. The advantage of rammed earth is its ability to take on a larger number of workers to directly dig and then build with minimum supervision. Building round walls has its own difficulties, setting out, formwork assembly and inserts all need attention. But as long as the formwork is set the workforce can just as easily build round as straight walls. The curved blockouts for forming the arched windows were interesting to make, formed from layers of hard board into laminated shells and cut to allow chamfered openings, high tech on a low budget.

Thatch and roof timbers were both found on site, the pole roof was treated with Borax in a tank made from oil drums.