Rammed Earth Construction Begins
The First Rammed Earth Wall Gets Rammed!
Thursday marked a big moment for us at Asquared Studios. Our Partner Jessie Whitesides, first read “The Rammed Earth House”, by David Easton, in 1997. Now, 20 years later she has seen her admiration of his expertise in earth building come to life as a significant part of one of our current projects. This single family home in the hills of Sonoma is now well under construction. In our previous post related to this project we explained the complexity of the “simple box” plan for this single family residence. Now, a significant amount of the structural steel has been installed and the largest rammed earth wall has been rammed. As with most minimalist design elements, the simplicity of the finished rammed earth product requires a great deal of complex coordination and preparation to come to life. To give you an idea of the complexity of what we have created here, we finalized our construction drawings about 1 year ago this month, and since then we have been coordinating the intricacies of connecting the rammed earth walls to perpendicular concrete walls, burying steel columns in the wall to support a floating roof, and installing plate steel door and window surrounds into the rammed earth formwork. So, when Rammed Earth Works (David Easton’s Construciton team) began filling the walls with our custom mix design on Thursday morning we reveled in the excitement. Rammed Earthworks has developed an efficient method for filling the walls with stabilized earth materials and ramming the material to a specified compaction. We are impressed by the dedication of his team, and we anxiously await the removal of the formwork in the coming week. For now we are excited to share a few process photos and videos with you through the links provided below.
Click links below to see more