Adobe brick making #2: Some adobe brick abodes

As part of my adobe brick making series, I thought I might show some examples of what an adobe brick building might look like.

I guess most people might imagine that an adobe brick building must necessarily look like came out of the southwest US but not so. Mudbrick has been used for centuries and there are far more mudbrick homes than you probably imagine. Many of them look like any other building that you are used to seeing.

I’ve chosen to limit my pictures to homes built here in New Zealand and to buildings which use the kind of unstabilized (ie: no cement added) mud bricks shown in my previous post. The main reason I do this, is that New Zealand is hardly the typical dry desert like landscape that one might associate with these buildings. Here, it is quite windy, frequent rains and widely variable and quickly changing weather because of the prevalence of two oceans close by on either side of us and a mountain range down the center.

Our main weather systems come from the south, ie: antarctic and it usually means cool and wet and windy.

In addition the islands are basically two land masses mushing up against each other, creating the mountains and earthquake hot spots pretty much throughout the country. Many parts of the country are active volcanoes. If all these things are not a true test of a house made from mud, I’m not sure what else could be thrown in the mix. ( Ok, It’s true we do not typically have tornadoes ). Murchison, where we plan to build, was the epicenter of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in 1929 which was felt along the entire length of the country. One of the things you will not see in our buildings are masonry chimneys because that’s what caused most of the injuries and deaths back then.

So here are a few pictures of existing buildings. Note: none of these are mine and none of these are the design which I plan to build. That is still a work in progress!

This is Peter Olorenshaw’s house in Nelson, an architect and engineer, about 1 1/2 hours NE of where we plan to build. Note the use of passive solar heating, solar hot water heating and PV panels. Also he has trombe walls, which are the things which look like a tinted windows -which are actually solar panels built into the wall and the bricks absorb the heat directly.

Inside view:

A local company called SolidEarth, which specializes in producing bricks, producing adobe houses and mud plastering has many more pictures of their projects, which only use un-stabilized earth bricks like the ones I am making. You can see their portfolio of projects here