Eco-Archi in Malawi

I didn't realize I've waited for so long to post an update. It seems that the roofs have been under the works FOR EVER.  We had wished to get them done by the end of November, before the rains would start.  Well, something like 20 weeks later, now that the rainy season is ending, we still don't have the roof structures covered. Better doing it Necola's way : sit back and wait The contractor hasn't finished placing the designed (by structural engineers) structure, and then the tiles supplier, who is an engineer himself, wasn't happy with the structure at some places and asked the structural engineers to reinforce it. So now, we are in the final stages of putting that */&àçéè' structure up... My fingers are hurting, they've been crossed for too long now ;)   But something is happening ! At the end of the day, it's going to be beautiful and inspiring :)

When you want to preserve the trees of the site you're building on, you have to go with some golden rules...  One of these is "you do not build too close from the trees", or else you'll damage the roots, and the tree you wanted to keep will die shortly... So the challenge was to build our stone boundary wall without damaging the roots of the beautiful Tree-on-the-Rock that is standing just at the limit of the site. And we did it ! It's such a nice place and will be perfect to come to meditate about the resilience of beings around us...    

So, yeah, this week saw the start of the production of our CSEB - Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks, also called "SSB" for Stabilized Soil bricks, or BTC in French, for Blocs de Terre Comprimée (manque un S pour stabilisée mais bref).  They are much more eco-friendly than the fired bricks (using a looot of wood to get cooked) or concrete (using a loooot of (imported) cement), as these blocks should count only 5% of cement for the stabilization, and don't need any plaster or paint or any other layer on them at the end to be confortable and beautiful. So some soil has already been extracted and sieved, and kinda analyzed ( a bit too roughly unfortunately), we had a bag of cement ready, some water nearby, a large area for the curing was prepared, the machine was assembled and we were ready to start testing ! We made our first blocks on Monday afternoon, guiding the guys for the dry mixing, the wet mixing, the steps for the compression, the handling on the block...

Apart from the developed drawings of the dormitory and family cottages, this week has seen progress on the materials...  On Tuesday we went to pay a visit to the executive director of Mulanje Conservation Trust in Mulanje, to learn more about the bamboos and other trees and plants that we could get from him, as well as SSBs and tiles that were used for the offices there. Being himself the son of an architect who worked here, he's pretty aware of all this. beautiful way among the tea estates of Mulanje some tiles had to be replaced as they were broken by the wrong placement of solar panels And on Friday, another architectural visit, this time to Mr Sonke, a very special architect-engineer who keeps "engineering" in the true manner ! He's living in the most special house I have ever been to, a "football" house that looks more like a water tower than a home ;) But it's actually very cosy inside, and of course the view is magnificent.  ...

The rock breakers did their best, helped by the JCB operator, to finish extracting the rocks from the central pit, I was asking for at the beginning of the week. This area can now be filled up by the JCB, the 2 heaps of soil have been moved, despite one day of rain which slowed down the rock breaking process (Tuesday) and one machine break down (on Thursday afternoon). I am not sure how many cubic meters of stone have been extracted and cut, but it might be somewhere around 4-5 tons. Other activities on site included : slightly moving the placement of the Family Cottages, now that the space was cleared; marking the dormitory placement, start sieving the soil for the CSEB ( I still would like to test the selected soil), building a grass fence along a wall where there's a limit disagreement with the neighbour, putting a tent up for the seed storage and day desk, clearing the area where we want to build dry compost toilets and marking their placement, preparing seedlin...