Don’t you love the smell of the first rains on the soil? That peculiar smell when mud gets wet and soaked! It’s called petrichor and it always takes me back to my childhood days spent at my grandparents and cousins homes. Homes that were modest, with mud walls and Mangalore tiles. So cool that we didn’t require air conditioners in the sultry summers. So airy with excellent cross ventilation. And luxurious not monetarily but simply from the fact that all indoor spaces spilled into the outdoors and the quality of space, light, ventilation and experience was extremely pleasant!
Using mud for building is as ancient as the oldest civilizations of Sumeria, Mesopotamia and closer to home, the Indus Valley with sites in India and Pakistan. From sun-dried to baked; cob to rammed earth; from Adobe to Compact Stabilised Earth Blocks (CSEB), systems of building with mud have been handed down across generations, all over the world. Through human history, massive forts (Morocco, Mali, Peru), common dwellings (Syria, Burkina Faso-Africa) and multi-storied buildings (Yemen), all built with mud, still stand today.
Goa too has its history with mud building. Lateritic soil was used as the ideal mixture for building in cob and rammed earth. Old houses made of mud still exist in Goa. Some of these have lived for centuries and still stand today. Besides the hinterlands and villages, Panjim city as well other towns too have a number of buildings that were built using mud.
With the discovery and production of cement, much has changed and mud began to be replaced by this wonder material overlooking the fact that cement had a very short life. While mud lasts forever as it can be reused, cement has only a life of 50-75 years. Mud also began to be looked down upon as a building material because more and more affluent people began to opt for reinforced cement concrete (RCC) as a better alternative to traditional materials. This meant that the not so rich continued building with mud and therefore the stigma. The building regulations code too designates mud as a ‘kuccha’ structure! So every where, in villages and hinterlands, traditional mud houses are slowly giving way to cement plastered boxes with RCC roofs. These in turn, because they heat up in summer as cement is excellent at retaining heat, then need air conditioners to keep the indoor spaces cool and comfortable. Large expanses of glass doors and windows also add to the heat gain and discomfort indoors.
Although these new materials have made a foray in modern building, almost a quarter of the world’s population still lives in houses and structures made with mud. In the current context, with a huge amount of pressure on non renewable resources and the looming impact of climate change, the trend is slowly changing with concerned individuals and communities adopting traditional systems and using the most abundantly available and versatile natural material – MUD.
Mud is locally available most times right in the backyard, has insulating properties and is easy to build with. It does not have high embodied energy and has a long life. It can always be recycled and reused unlike modern materials like cement, glass and steel which have a high embodied energy-energy used in all the processes of making the building, from mining to manufacturing, transport and delivery!
A house essentially provides shelter and comfort from the vagaries of nature. With climate change, resulting in a rise in temperatures and extremes in weather, the challenges to build a comfortable home are even greater.
In many parts of the world, local communities are beginning to realize the benefits of building with mud – walls, floors and even vaulted roofs; thus building resilience to climate change. In Goa too, while there is a concern about depleting construction resources like sand, laterite and bricks, an environmentally conscious community that is keen to adopt traditional mud building technologies, is slowly growing.
So can one build a house in a small budget with materials sourced locally? Can one build with ordinary mud? Mud from the plot itself?
In this day and age, where land is becoming scarce and local building material like laterite and stone no longer available, it is very much possible to look within and find solutions that are far simpler.
Laurie Baker, the Gandhi of Architecture would often say that the most sustainable buildings are the ones that are built with the mud in ones backyard and most other material from the plot itself like wood from trees.
So if you have a plot, all one needs to do is take off the top soil (rich in nutrients and organic matter) to be replaced later and use the soil underneath as per one’s requirement. The new levels in the plot can be made in such a way as not to disturb the natural drainage of the plot.The local laterite soil is excellent for mud building as it has the right amount of clay for adhesion, sand and murrum to prevent cracks. With an optimal addition of water, the soil can be compressed to make a hard block. So rammed earth walls that are constructed using a formwork where the soil in placed and rammed with metal or wooden rammers, simply make it very hard. On testing we have found that it can achieve the strength the laterite stone!
So if each individual had to simply build from the soil available from within the plot of land, our finite sources of laterite stone, sand and other such materials would have been conserved. Also like traditional communities, this method of building encourages collaborative working. And mud structures can be rebuilt by using the same mud.
Mud building like other traditional technologies is not rocket science. Anybody and everybody can employ this method. By sharing knowhow we will regain lost knowledge and help others to build similarly. This way we can help communities rediscover and share local, traditional and other contemporary technologies of constructing a mud house. This will empower any individual to build in a cost effective manner and become less dependent on employing expensive formal labour and materials.
(Tallulah D’Silva is a
practicing architect in Goa)
