Earthbag Construction

In investigating various forms of green construction I read about the work of international award-winning architect Nader Khalili. Nader is an Iranian-born architect who abandoned a successful career designing skyscrapers to follow his heart, which led him to create an innovative sandbag/superadobe/earthbag architecture as a means of providing low-tech, enduring affordable housing. Inspired by the ingenious monolithic adobe buildings of his homeland of Iran, Nader conceived the idea of building domed and vaulted structures with bags of earth.

Earthbags have the advantage of being able to use a wider range of soil types than traditional earth building techniques. You can adapt soils for use in earthbags that have ranged from zero clay to 50 percent clay content. No type of fiber was needed within the soil. Since the bag acts as a textile container for the earth, the woven fibers do the job of stabilizing the soil in place so the soil can have a lesser quality binding strength than required for most other types of earthen construction. When necessary, even dry sand can be used as fill, as could be the case in providing emergency relief shelter.

The bags or tubes are filled in place on the wall being built so there is no heavy lifting. After a whole row is laid, the bags are compacted from above with hand tampers. The compacted earth later cures to a cement-like hardness. Two strands of four-point barbed wire are laid in between every row that act as a “Velcro” hook-and-latch mortar, cinching the bags together while providing continuous built-in tensile strength. Tensile strength inhibits the walls from being pulled apart during stressful conditions like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and load-bearing and lateral forces. The combined strength of the four-point barbed wire sandwiched in between the woven textile fabric of every row of earthbags adds a significant degree of tensile resilience that is lacking in most traditional forms of earthen architecture.