What is Natural Building?
By Core Team member Ali Ostergard
One of our guest cabins
We have been building our infrastructure with natural and local materials since the Ranch’s inception in 2001. Our homes are all sculpted from the earth beneath our feet, and we continue to develop and learn along the way about how to perfect natural building in this challenging tropical environment. There is something very special about the feeling of a home when you know the story behind where the materials came from and all the work and joy that went into the whole process.
So what is natural building? I would say the definition goes deeper than just constructing buildings with “natural” materials. After all how do we define what natural is? Is plastic natural? Technically it comes from oil, which comes from the earth, so one could argue that it is natural in origin, although you could also argue that due to the heavy amount of processing that goes into converting it into plastic moves it into the realm of a non-natural material. What about concrete? Again, it is just composed of portland cement (a mixture of limestone, shale, and other natural minerals), gravel and water. Yet concrete is often seen as a material not to be used in natural building. Why is this? It has something to do with the massive environmental effects it is causing through its production including, the high energy consumed in the mining, manufacturing, and transporting of cement, along with the related air pollution, making cement (a main ingredient in concrete) a large contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Somewhere around 10% of current world greenhouse gas emissions are from the production of cement, and that number is predicted to raise 12-24% in the next thirty years.
Yet all this bad mouthing on concrete, and we still need this material in our modern world. For what it provides, we don’t currently have anything to replace it. For certain uses in our modern construction world, we need concrete; there is simply no other material that does what it does. Where we have gone wrong in the use of this amazing building material is that we now use it everywhere! Concrete is overly used in every building, home, city, and suburb. There are many other natural and more sustainable materials that could be used in a lot of areas in modern construction, but instead people resort to using concrete. Walls are a fantastic example, there really is no functional purpose to make your walls out of concrete, there are so many materials that have less environmental impact and perform much better than concrete as a wall system.
Buildings around the world account for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions. The time has come to reimagine our current housing choices. We are going to get nowhere on this planet without realizing we are a part of nature. So the more natural you can make a house, the better off you’re going to be.
Adobe brick shower with tadelakt lime plaster finish
Circling back around to what is natural building then? Here are some things we are considering when choosing building materials for our structures:
Locality- how far did that product come before arriving at your building? How natural is your material anymore if it’s coming all the way from China, when we could use what is locally found here in Mastatal?
Organic- how fast will that material break down or go back to earth after its lifespan? Buildings come and go, generations change, natural disasters strike, modern conveniences evolve. What happens to that building when it’s no longer of use? We are proud to say that if we took off the metal roof, and removed the few plastic electrical items in our buildings, the jungle would take back the rest of the materials. They would literally go back to where they began.
Processing- how much processing was involved to get that material from its raw state into what you are using now? The clay that we dig out to build our walls goes through very little processing compared to the zinc roofing sheets.
Longevity- how long will this material last? Ultimately we want and need our structures to last for a significant amount of time. If we build a home that is constantly falling apart, needing repairs, the maintenance on that is going to be too much and we are probably going to give up. With a good design and a bit of know-how, natural materials can last in your home for your lifetime and there are examples of naturally built homes in virtually every type of climate that have lasted at least 100 years (some lasting much more).
At the Ranch we have been practicing and perfecting the art of natural building, especially for tropical climates. After decades of trial and error and fine tuning every detail, we are pretty confident we have come to a pretty dang perfect natural building style for tropical architecture.
Bernie’s Bunkhouse- a good showcase of what a typical building is made of here
Our natural homes consist of:
Timber frame- a style of post and beam construction that uses only wood and no metal fasteners. Using locally, sustainably sourced and milled species.
Earthen walls- in a style referred to as wattle and daub, a mixture of sand, clay and straw that is applied to a bamboo lattice. We also use adobe bricks in many aspects of the building.
Clay and lime plasters- both used in different scenarios.
Earthen floors- again a mixture of sand, clay, and straw.
Concrete foundations- yep, that controversial product. As I mentioned earlier, concrete is an amazing building material for certain aspects of building. In our case we live in a highly seismic area, concrete is currently the best material to use for the safety and longevity of our buildings.
Zinc roofing- also a heavily processed material, but in our area where we receive 4-6 meters of rain a year, this is the most sustainable material in the long run for our natural homes. We often say the beauty of these natural materials is you add water and they return to a workable state, but this is also their weakness. Therefore good protection in the forms of your roof and foundation are essential in the longevity of your building.
Over the years we have made an effort to build in a style that also appeals to the masses. We have plenty of unique and very different styles, but it was important for us to develop building styles that would be equally at home in an urban or rural area. We feel like all too often natural building has fallen into the bracket of only being suitable for the owner builder, or the hippies, or the isolated farm and we would like to create a style that is pleasing to a larger audience and demonstrate its flexibility in applications.
An example of the artistry clay plasters can have
We each have a part to play in this paradigm shift. When our buildings are having such a direct effect on the climate and our health, we are a part of that, and we have to make the choice of whether we would like to change that.
Patagonia put out a short film on the natural building movement, specifically looking at straw bale building. As Yvon Chouinard said,
“The solution may be for a lot of the world’s problems is to turn around and take a forward step. You can’t just keep trying to make a flawed system work.”
We have been offering natural building workshops for decades. These building classes teach people about building with timber, clay and lime in any climate. We are excited to be able to offer a heavily discounted natural building class for Central Americans in Spanish each year too.
Learn More
Want to get hands on practice and theory in many of these mentioned natural building techniques? Join us for one of our yearly workshops.
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