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    Rammed Earth Consulting logo

    86 Brougham Road
    86, Brougham Road, London E8 4PB, UK
    London
    E8 4PB

    (0)20 7241 4684

    Profile:

    rammedearth-teamRammed Earth Consulting CIC are a not for profit consultancy dealing with a wide range of projects concerned with the built environment. With many years experience there are plenty examples of rammed earth buildings which we have both built and consulted on.

    We offer services in soil selection on or off site. This may involve mixing more than one other material to site soil, more sand to a clayey soil, more stones where the soil is very fine. And once a soil is looking ok we take it to commercial labs for testing.

    We offer design help, often at the start of a design process, helping architects, engineers and surveyors to better understand how rammed earth fits into a job, how strong it is, the shapes it can be formed into and of course the cost.

    We train contractors on site and liaise with specialists where a main contractor can't manage the work. We work with contractors on site, and we are working on training standards which can be applied on site or at a training centre.

    But building is not just buildings, its about people, their knowledge, hopes, ideas. Building is the something which happens in a context, hot or cold, money or loans, team or self build, experience or not and many other factors.

    The past century has been the development of building standards and regulations. These have appeared around the world and while some materials have received a lot of attention, others have been 'forgotten'. It is this deficit which is a major area of work for us.

    Rammed Earth Consulting have written a Code of Practice for Rammed Earth Structures which is now a national standard in 15 countries in Africa. A UK publication, Rammed Earth: Design and Construction Guidelines has become the de-facto standard for the use of rammed earth in the UK, and has also influenced similar work in France. The Guideline has also lead to BREEAM acceptance of rammed earth, and inclusion in the BRE IMPACT system. Rammed earth is an integral part of the IMPACT system, to know more about IMPACT read this article.

    Rammed earth also has a National Building Specification, 25-00-70, but you need to be on their system to use it. Being part of the NBS system, like BREEAM, means that rammed earth has a wider audience which leads to better understanding.

    Building buildings allows direct experience of what an earth building could look and feel like, it is a chance to experience something very old in a new way. This is true for the people that inhabit the building, that use it, as well as for the designers and builders. We have concentrated on public buildings because they allow the widest group of people to experience this without having to use their own resources. Over time as they come to appreciate the qualities of the material their confidence will grow and perhaps invest in their own earth building. So it is necessary to work with buildings and with the wider context of building to make the use of rammed earth easier and 'normal'. Because this takes time we have to use a wide range of means and so we were a founder of Earth Building UKI, a charity which seeks to bring together the widest group of earth building builders, users, designers, producers, funders, regulators and students to understand better what each of us is doing. We also try to reach as wide an audience as we can outside the earth building world.

    Listed under:

    Rammed earth building - courses , Rammed earth building - products & services

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