Natural Building

What is Natural Building?

Natural Building includes a variety of building techniques that focus on creating sustainable buildings which minimize their negative ecological impact. Natural Buildings often rely on non-industrial, minimally processed, locally available, and renewable materials and can also utilize recycled or salvaged materials.

Natural Building ideally incorporates sustainable design practices to integrate the building into its environment. It may also integrate electricity production, water catchment, passive heating and cooling, and alternative waste-treatment.

See the following links for more information about natural building.

Why we do Natural Building

Creating homes and buildings that are healthy for humans and for the planet is an essential part of sustainability. At Dancing Rabbit we strive towards these ideals as we try to create homes which are functional, long-lasting, and aesthetically pleasing. We try to minimize the embodied energy in our homes while also minimizing the ongoing energy needed for operation and maintenance.

Of course our homes are not perfect manifestations of the natural building ideal. For instance, we still use some industrial products such as concrete, drywall, and steel roofing in many of our homes. We are still learning to integrate our homes into the surrounding environment.

You Can Do Natural Building With Us

We see Dancing Rabbit as a place for learning about natural building. Visitors can get hands on experience with the various technologies and we hope to have more natural building workshops in the future. We also encourage those with natural building skills and aspirations to come join us. We'd love for you to build your natural home here at DR, and share your skills with us as we share ours with you. Plus we have many paid work opportunities for those with building skills from those in the village who want help building a home.

Natural Building Materials, Techniques & Technologies

There are many Natural Building technologies in the world that are adaptable to the many climates and bioregions. Most of them rely on a few basic materials: earth, wood, and straw (where straw can be loosely defined to include any dried non-woody plant material such as palm fronds, reeds, etc.). Depending on the climate these materials can be combined in any number of ways to make a natural home.

At DR we have ready access to many natural building materials. We are very lucky to have an abundance of clay (though the gardeners may differ on this point) which is a basic ingredient for many natural building techniques. Straw bales are readily available from our farming neighbors, but construction quality wood is in shorter supply in our prairie savannah ecosystem. Our woodlands are mostly oak-hickory and we have used some native lumber, but our primary source of building wood is salvage.

At Dancing Rabbit we have employed the following natural and alternative building technologies:

• Strawbale - Strawbales can be stacked like bricks to make the walls of a house. We have created both load-bearing (roof supported by the bales) and non-load-bearing straw homes.
• Cob - Cob is a mixture of straw, clay, and sand similar to adobe but lumps of cob are applied wet to build up a wall, bench, or as thermal mass around stoves.
• Light-Clay Straw - Also called, clay-slip straw, clay is mixed with water until it is the consistency of paint and then is mixed with straw until every straw fiber is coated. The Straw-clay is then packed into forms or wall cavities for insulation.
• Wattle and Daub - Wattles are made from flexible wood or fibers and are woven loosely to create an underlying structure for a wall (imagine a loosely woven basket). Plaster is then daubed onto the wattle to finish the wall and provide thermal mass.
• Natural Earth Plaster and Lime Plaster - Most of the above techniques are finished off with a natural plaster. Earthen plaster is made from clay, sand, and straw (or sometimes other fibers such as cattail fluff or manure). Lime plaster is made with sand, hydrated lime, and sometimes fiber (straw, animal hair, etc.). Lime is made by heating limestone in a kiln and has been used since ancient times. Lime plaster is much more weather proof than earth plaster but has less embodied energy than cement stucco.
• 
  Frost Protected Gravel Bag Foundation Rubble Trench, Urbanite, Gravel Bags, and Frost Protected Foundations - One of the trickiest parts of natural building is the foundation. We have used a few techniques to minimize the amount of concrete used in our buildings (concrete has high embodied energy and produces greenhouse gases in its production). For a rubble trench we dig down to the frost line and install a drain pipe in a gravel filled trench. Water flows out the pipe and the trench foundation therefore can't "frost heave" from water expanding as it freezes. To build the foundation up above the ground level we have used Urbanite (reused broken up concrete) and gravel bags (polypropylene bags filled with gravel). While the bags are plastic and thus not very natural, their embodied energy is low when considered as a durable part of a house. We have also insulated many of our foundations to protect them from freezing which allows them to be shallower and use less material.
• 
  Installing an Earth FloorEarth Floors - Also called adobe floors, an earthen floor is made from the same material as cob or earth plaster and is troweled to a smooth finish. It is then oiled, which hardens it and allows it to be swept and mopped.
• Timber Framing - Timber framing is an old natural building technology which uses heavy timbers and joins them using mortise and tenon construction techniques rather than smaller wood and nails or screws. A timber frame wall can then be filled in with straw bale, light-clay straw, cob, or any number of materials.
• Thatch - Thatch is used throughout the world for walls and roofs. We have experimented with using native prairie grasses for thatching with some success.

In the future we hope to use some of these other technologies as well:

• Adobe - Adobe, like cob is made from straw, clay, and sand but is sun dried into bricks and then stacked to form walls. It is generally finished with an earth plaster.
• Rammed Earth - Earth can be pounded into forms to create massive walls to form a house. While utilizing minimal resources it can be very labor intensive.
• Earthships - Earthships are a method of rammed earth where earth is rammed into used tires that are stacked to form walls. We have used this technique for a retaining wall on an earth bermed house.
• Earth bag - Earth can also be packed into polypropylene bags that are stacked to build a wall. The bags are then plastered over to protect them from UV degradation. This technique has been used at our neighboring community Red Earth Farms
• Living Roof - A living roof allows plants to grow on top of a roof. Soil is placed over a waterproof membrane on an extra-sturdy roof. The soil and plants can help keep a building cool in summer and warm in winter by evapo-transpiration, thermal mass, and insulation.

At Dancing Rabbit we also use more mainstream ecological building techniques such as stick framing (from reclaimed and local lumber), blow-in cellulose, drywall, and wood siding (salvaged from old barns). We have even salvaged an old Grain Bin and turned into a strawbale building. We also have some concrete foundations and concrete block walls (for cisterns and earth berming). Most of our roofs are metal roofs to aid in water catchment systems.

For info on some of our buildings see:

• Online Tour: a quick run through of all our buildings and more.
• Community Building: All about our common house that serves the needs of both community members and Dancing Rabbit's outreach program.
• Skyhouse: A 6 bedroom communal house for Skyhouse Community.
• A Strawbale Cabin: A photo essay from 1998 of the wall raising of our first building.
• How to build a cistern: Adapted from an article from a past newsletter on the cistern in one of our residences.
• Grain Bin: The 40-year-old grain bin on the property has been renovated into living space!
• Ironweed Kitchen: Information on Ironweed's cob/strawbale kitchen as well as their subcommunity.

Other pages on our site with info on our natural buildings:

• And a Roof Over Our Heads - An article by Aaron Corbin from 1997 on living roof design.
• Earth and Sky - An article from 1999 by Tony Sirna on Skyhouse construction plans.
• Earth Floors - An article by Tony Sirna from our summer '01 newsletter on an adobe floor / rammed earth floor.
• Straw Houses - an article by Alline Anderson from our winter 2002 newsletter
• Adventures in Straw Building - An article by Andra Eaks from our winter 2003 newsletter
• Systemic Shelter Change - An article by Cecil Scheib from 2005 on the state of building in our country
• A Roof over Our Heads - An interview from 2006 by Juan Borla of Tamar Friedner on the subject of Ironweed's roof and insulation system.

Additional Natural Building Resources:

• Natural building materials and techniques
• Natural Building Network
• Workshops on natural building
• Organizations involved in teaching and promoting natural building.