BUILDING WITHOUT BRICKS.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1920, Page 11

BUILDING WITHOUT BRICKS.

HOW THE HOUSE FAMINE CAN BE MET. One million new houses are required at once. How is the demand to be met, m view of the famine in labor, bricks and building materials, asks Tit Bits' Wooden housds are suggested tut their cost and lack of durability do not seem to promise a proper solution of the pressing problem. There are, however, other resources, old-fashioned, but none the less practical and economical. Indeed, the ideas of our forefathers, who built their honors and cottages of earth, straw, clay, and chalk, might well be revived. Toniay, Hayes Barton, the house in which Sir Walter Raleigh was born over three and a-half centuries ago, is as good as ever it was. Yet it is merelv what is known as a cob buiidin?, the walls of which were built with sand and clay mixed with water and a great quantity of long wheat straw trodden in. The proportion of the ingredients varies with the local conditions of the clay and sand, the walls being built up of the mixture in '-courses" about two feet high, each coi:re being aiiowed to dry before another is added. The drying takes- from two to three weeks, according to weather, hut with several buildirgg in course of construction, the workman could turn from one to the

other as the courses were drying, thus avoiding waste of time. In the West country, where cob-build-inj is still a living craft, walls have lasted a century without the slightest repair.

Another method of construction which, although it goes back centuries, will have to be considered by the authorities, Is known as the pise method, the walls being built of rammed or compressed earth.

While the cob method is wet, pise Is drs*. The earth is simply rammed between wooden casings, the walls being in stages of some three feet in height, and the wooden cases raised at intervals, as required. Any eartli which has neither the lightness of poor lands nor the stiffness of clay can be used, some of the best being found when digging trenches und cellars for buildings. The art lies in depositing the moulding, three to four inches at a time, and so ramming it that it weld* together in thickness and consistency, the walls being afterwards cemented on the outside. HOUSE BUILT OF BOTTLES. Such buildings were cheap, warm, and comfortable, and it was only owmg to th» advert of bricks and cement that this method of construction gradually died out. Hollow walls and roofs of crushed furnace clinker and cement are also advocated, as well as- asphalt and concrete houses, built on the same lines as the concrete ships. Experiments have also been tried with peat as a possible substitute for wood. A large paper house containing 1(1 rooms was erected some years ago by a Russian nobleman upon his estate at Savinowka, in Podolia. The house was constructed in America, according to his own ideas, and cost over £SOOO. To make the triumph of paper still more emphatic, the owner resolved that the whole of his furniture should also be made of paper. A house built of beer bottles was once an interesting feature of Tonopah, Ne> vada. It was on account of the local seircity of timber that a miner conceived the idea of building himself a dwelling from a huge stack of old beer bottles. Over ten thousand heer bottles were incorporated in the dwelling.

Probably the only liaise in existence that is built entirely of rich mineralbearing quartz is situated in Montana, U-S. The rocks used in the structure are all honeycombed on the surface, showing where minerals have washed out in the course of time. Experts state that there are still present in the rocks gold, silver, copper, zinc, and other metals to a value far more than double that of a similar house of ordinary building material. One Russian Empress conceived the idea of building a palace of ice, so that when a courtier offended her he was condemned to spend a night in its chilly interior.