[GSBN] building in Haiti

[Bruce King]

Howdy, Baleheads --

Ecological Building Network (EBNet) has won an international  
competition for the best new housing ideas for Haiti, and we’ve just  
been asked to build our model in a very prominent location.  I am both  
proud and puzzled to say that our apparently unique winning idea is:   
use Haitian materials and Haitian people to build a Haitian house.  
Everyone else in the exposition will be importing prefabricated  
contraptions, at least so far as I know.

After a lot of meetings and discussion among a lot of knowledgeable  
folks -- including a bunch of you -- we arrived at an optimal   
"natural" design we think best suited to the culture, economy and  
climate of Haiti.  The EBNet model home will use the most abundant and  
inexpensive local resources—concrete rubble, bamboo, and the huge  
local labor pool—to make seismically safe houses at or below the cost  
of conventional (and unsafe) masonry houses.

With that all said, two questions:

1) We expect to use a thick, fiber-rich earth plaster over bamboo (or  
possibly metal) mesh for a lot of the walls, but need to give it a  
very durable finish (see wall section in the onliine link).  "Durable"  
here means not only resistant to abrasion and driving rain, but also  
forced entry;  it has to be and feel secure against intruders.  I seem  
to recall some discussion on this list about lime and lime-cement  
plasters over earth, and Bill Steen reporting that he could never get  
that to really work -- too much delamination despite efforts to bond  
things.

Anybody have thoughts or suggestions?

2) We have to raise $75,000 in a pretty short time, so any leads or  
suggestions are most welcome.  We seek both philanthropic support and  
commercial sponsorship at this prominent exposition.

Thanks, and cheers all around,

Bruce "Mr. Natural" King
Director of EBNet
Ecological Building Network
the art and science of building well
bruce at ecobuildnetwork.org
PO Box 6397
San Rafael, CA 94903 USA
(415) 987-7271
follow us on Twitter: @EBNetwork

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