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Case Study 2
Moulded out of mud
by Renu Ramanath
Architect Eugine Pandala, based in Kollam, Kerala, has always been a staunch votary of mud, when it comes to environment-friendly building materials. Pandala’s experiments with mud as a construction medium had started during his student days at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, following an encounter with Hassan Fathy – the Egyptian architect and advocate of mud architecture, who had authored the book, Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt.
Owiyam, a retreat he built for a group of young Indian and German artists at Marayoor in Idukki district of Kerala, bagged him an award for Eco-Friendly Design in 2007 – which he shared with Yatin Pandya. Nestling among the rolling hills of Western Ghats at Marayoor and built entirely out of mud, thatch and rocks, Owiyam looks like it’s growing out of the surrounding boulders.
The building, less than 1,000 sq. ft. in area, stands on a seven-acre plot that was earlier a sugarcane field. The clients, who believe in living the natural way, wanted to restore the land to its former state as much as possible. The only intervention in the landscape was the construction of a rainwater harvesting tank. Soil and rocks excavated in the process were used for construction. A stream coming down from the top of the hill flows through this plot.
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The cob technique, Pandala’s favourite mode of construction with mud, was adopted – as using large lumps of mud gives him the freedom to sculpt the walls in a free-flowing manner.
The highlight of the building is a wrap-around verandah that hugs the living space and bedroom, with a semi-open bathroom and a staircase leading to another living space upstairs. In the bathroom, a tap is connected directly to the stream winding down from the hill-top, and fresh water flows down straight from the source without any energy consumption. Natural boulders and pebbles collected from the site are used in the bathroom floor, while the clay tiles used in the living spaces and bedroom were all made on site by local craftsmen.
The boulders and stones project from the walls, adding to the rugged look. Mud is used for more than the walls, even the staircase and the built-in bed is sculpted out of it. Beeswax is used to polish the built-in bed. Locally available beeswax is used for candles as well, since the building has no electricity.
The roof is thatched, with bundles of sugarcane leaves (again, locally available) thatched on a frame work of timber. Perhaps the only extraneous material used in this construction is the panels of toughened glass for windows. This was unavoidable, as the heavy monsoon rain and wind lashing the region warrants strong protection. However, the adobe walls offer good protection against the dampness and chill in the rainy season and during winter. Adobe absorbs the available solar heat during the day, radiating the heat back at night.
Mud is the most fundamental building material used by human beings, points out Pandala. If judiciously employed, making use of the locally available soil alone, it causes the least damage to the environment. River sand mining and stone quarrying, two of the severe environmental hazards caused as a direct result of construction activities, can be reduced considerably if people are willing to experiment, believes Pandala.
“I’d call a green building something that is absolutely natural,” says the architect. “All traditional buildings, before the coming of cement, were natural or ‘green’ in that sense. You can’t paint a building green and call it a green building!” he quips. “True green should be true to nature.”
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