Natural Building

One often hears the words Eco-Building, but I am interested in Natural Building, so what’s the difference?

My belief is that eco-building refers to a building and where the primary focus is on the energy saving properties of that structure. As such, they may have some or all of the following attributes;

• energy efficient
• super-insulated
• triple-glazed
• maximum solar gain, getting warmth from the sun in winter, keeping naturally cool in the summer, attained through careful siting of the building relative to the sun’s path, local geography, trees etc., specifying smaller windows on north-facing walls and larger windows facing south, potential use of heat-sinks that collect warmth during the day and release it at night
• energy generation, such as solar PV, solar water heating, wind generators and the like

Natural Building encompasses the above definition of eco-building, but adds to that the careful choice of materials and methods used in the construction too. Many eco-buildings utilise a lot of concrete (the manufacture of which produces very large amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollutants) and synthetic materials, whereas natural buildings take into account the embodied energy of the construction materials in a bid to not only be energy-efficient when constructed, but to use less energy in their construction and in the materials used.

So if you aren’t using concrete and other ‘normal’ materials, what are natural buildings made from? There are a huge variety of materials that people use, some of which may stretch the word natural a little, but they vary from earth-bags (literally using bags filled with earth!), to wooden, to strawbale, to cob (a clay, sand and straw mixture), and many more. My main interests are cob, strawbale and wood, because all of these materials can be found and used (and are proven to perform well) in our typical UK climate.

Natural building per se isn’t something new. For thousands of years, people have been using natural materials such as cob (mud) and wood to make structures simply out of necessity because these were the materials they had to hand. They can also last well too - cob was the traditional building technique in Devon and parts of South-Wales until quite recently, and many of the buildings are still standing, several hundred years after being built. Modern natural building is simply taking these time-tested methods and updating them where appropriate, adding into the design, the energy saving knowledge we have nowadays to produce a truely ecologically sound building.