Earth, Straw, Tires, and Love: Natural Building Series - Part 1
Above: Natural building materials - rammed earth, straw, tires, and earth bags. Photo credit: Natural Building Works
This is part one of a three-part series that takes a deep dive into the world of Natural Building. We explore what makes a natural building, ways that natural buildings can have a profound and lasting impact on human well-being and the environment, and how natural building may hold the key to sustaining healthy and resilient communities here in Arizona.
If you missed the introduction to the series, click here to get caught up!
Local First Arizona sat down with a group of local experts and professionals to get an in-depth perspective on the materials and methods used in natural building, along with its advantages and challenges.
Let’s meet our experts:
Raymond Xylon Clamons is an architectural designer, natural builder and musician passionate about strengthening a sustainable community through architecture, landscape design and educational events. His company Natural Building Works incorporates his many passions specializing in low carbon & high performance architecture, water harvesting landscapes, natural building and permaculture.
Deborah Chah has a lifelong history in the field of construction. Over the years, she has delved into project management, property acquisitions and development, both on-site and off-site housing production, mortgage banking and residential contracting with emphasis on green infill. She is currently planning a 70-unit housing community with an emphasis on natural building materials, sustainability, and affordability near downtown Tucson.
Lucas Johnson of Vali Homes has contributed as a scientist, builder, utility program manager, and materials supplier to deliver over 10,000 high performance building projects ranging from deep energy retrofits of large commercial buildings to Net Zero Passive Houses with natural materials. His focus is reducing our collective carbon impact and building resilience to a changing climate while pushing for the right to comfortable, healthy, and affordable homes as a core element of social justice.
Mark Lambertsen is a retired pilot that has always had an interest in home design. He wants to be part of a team that can generate more interest in good building that makes sense from a multitude of perspectives.
Billy Humphries is an inventor, entrepreneur, and realtor with eXp Realty. He works with cutting edge technologies to find solutions to withstand the future and build sustainable systems.
Alec Kelly-Jones was born in Sydney, Australia and came to the University of Arizona to play rugby but quickly discovered a passion for green building and sustainable design here in the Sonoran Desert, where extreme weather conditions and mitigating passive design are a way of life. He is pursuing a Master of Architecture at U of A CAPLA with the goal of applying his background on the means and methods of green building and sustainable design to the wider practices of architecture.
What are some of the materials used in natural building and where can they be found?
Ray Clamons: Common natural materials used here in Arizona are rammed earth, straw, and tires - which are debated how natural they are but if you look at the definition of natural building, it means using the least modified materials - materials where the least amount of carbon goes into changing the material to get a building product out of it.
Lucas Johnson: Building materials are like food: hyper-processed foods are not good for our health. This is the same for materials. How many steps does it take for the material to change from the natural state to the material used in your house? If you take the worst material on the planet, spray foam insulation, there are close to 90 steps and 300 ingredients. Wood fiber insulation has 3 ingredients. Mother nature is our greatest scientist and has had many years to test what is durable.
Left: Straw-bale construction near Tucson, AZ.
Photo credit: Hayes Construction; Natural Building Works
What are some benefits and challenges of using natural building materials and methods?
Lucas Johnson: A challenge is getting these materials at scale. There has been a huge demand for natural materials, but these companies are not part of the global financial markets that exist for them to scale quickly. They are the rebels outside of the industry. Accessing materials that became popular during the pandemic is the biggest challenge at the moment. We have to make materials available on a scale that satisfies the demand of a growing population in Arizona and globally. Until then, development companies that want natural building materials but can’t get them will choose wasteful and hazardous materials to keep on schedule.
Ray Clamons: An important distinction to make here is between natural materials and low-carbon materials. Natural building materials are rawer in form; a pile of earth, a field of straw, logs coming out of the forest. Once you process that into a product, it becomes more of a low-carbon material. This is the place where the distribution chain can affect the products but maybe not so much the raw materials. Lumber supply chains have been severely disrupted at this time. But you can find a pile of earth and a pile of straw pretty close to home, and there’s a lot of it because people aren’t utilizing it. That’s a hard spot for natural materials.
Alec Kelly-Jones: On the positive side of natural building materials, being surrounded by unprocessed natural materials supports good mental health functioning and happiness.
Ray Clamons: What Alec shared is right, it’s an entire thing to lay on top of natural material benefits that are usually left out until the end: human comfort and human health. Most natural buildings feel better than a processed or plastic building.
Lucas Johnson: Beyond the occupant is worker health, safety, and equity. One of the bigger problems we have in construction is underprivileged people getting stuck working with hazardous and highly toxic materials like pink foam insulation. I have never seen anyone not enjoy working with wood fiber insulation. Having the wood aesthetic improves the experience of the worker as well as the occupant. Something else that gets ignored is: what happens to buildings at the end of life? Every building will become ‘trash’ at some point in the future - natural buildings can be turned into reuse, compost, and recycling materials, while conventional buildings are demolished and sent to the landfill.
What are the advantages of natural buildings in a place like Arizona?
Deborah Chah: The history of indiginous people using rammed earth, clay, and straw is a foundation for our plans going forward at the village at Sentinel Park and in Tucson. We have great local examples of historic properties that have lasted hundreds of years
Ray Clamons: Building with earth is the indignous method. There are 100+ year old buildings that we are remodeling in town. We cut a hole through a wall, and now there is a pile of earth that we can reuse. We can turn it into something. We were able to take the scraps from one piece of the house to make something else in the house look better. The client was blown away by that. If it was sheetrock, wood studs, and foam insulation, it all would have gone straight into the dumpster.
Lucas Johnson: From a science standpoint, natural buildings work particularly well in hot mixed climates, Arizona being the preeminent example. There isn’t a lot of moisture so temperatures fluctuate a lot during the day, sometimes going from 85°F by day down to 35°F at night. With those big temperature swings, natural building methods create the ability for buildings to temperature buffer, meaning it takes a long time for a natural building to change temperature. Your building can get colder at night, which will make it take longer to get hot during the day, meaning your A/C doesn’t have to kick on until much later. When we design for human health, comfort, and enjoyment, the product is a low carbon, high performance and efficient building.
Billy Humphries: There’s not a lot of education in the general public when it comes to what makes a natural or ‘good’ building material, or how those materials affect the longevity of the house. Cookie cutter homes are the standard and it makes it easier to overlook a home option that is efficient or eco-friendly solely for the reason that everyone else is doing it, so they feel it gives them a pass to go in that direction. The more communities we create that are sustainable and eco-friendly, more homebuyers are going to look for houses that are eco-friendly, or in this case, built with natural materials. It will spread. We’re at the beginning of the movement.
Left: Remodeled casita using rammed earth
Photo credit: Natural Building Works
What are some common misconceptions that people have about natural buildings?
Ray Clamons: Termites. Every conversation, “won’t termites eat that?” is mentioned. If you walk into a stick-frame house, you don’t get those same questions. The termites will eat the same wood in that stick-frame house. Also, “can rammed earth take the rain?” There have been examples of them falling apart in the rain. Just like any system, there are a lot of factors at play. It depends on your materials, what types of stabilizing cement you are using. There’s a space in the middle where things work with the constraints involved, and includes a whole other list of materials including bamboo and hemp.
Deborah Chah: This makes me think about clay and it’s other uses, like in potted plants. Those are made of glazed clay. Dinnerware is fired clay, which is a natural building material. Maybe there’s other daily use items that we don’t consider as a natural building material that could support the durability of the material in other uses that we don’t often acknowledge. We subject these materials to the forces of dishwashers, so borrowing from relatable uses could help build confidence in using these materials in our housing.
Billy Humphries: There’s also a misconception that using different materials than everyone else is more expensive. As a young person, our whole generation wants houses, and if it’s more expensive it pushes us to not even think about the whole swathe of possibility when in reality there are so many savings that come from houses constructed using natural and low carbon materials. These savings can far outweigh the economic and environmental costs associated.
Home prices in Arizona have soared over 20% during the past year - can natural buildings insulate us from future housing price spikes and availability?
Ray Clamons - A natural building is something you want to hold onto because it feels good, it’s providing those mental and emotional benefits while providing thermal regulation and high building performance, so you might want to stay put.
Lucas Johnson: Natural materials are now relatively more inexpensive - FSC certified lumber is less than bad lumberyard lumber, sometimes thousands less upfront. We were about to get engineered wood products made of reclaimed wood chips that were straighter, better, and less expensive than traditional wood. It’s unfortunate because current prices are so out of control, it’s been difficult to make everything affordable for people. At the same time, there is an argument for how building ‘good’ with natural materials is the same cost or less expensive than building conventionally.
Lucas Johnson: There are anecdotal stats on passive homes that show value goes up and likelihood of staying has dramatically increased - by double or triple. The value seems silly now because they aren’t moving out of the home. Homes are also no longer seen as just an investment, it’s seen as a place to be and raise your family.
Stay tuned for Part 2 which will explore the natural buildings currently existing in Arizona with a sneak peek into future projects that could make housing more affordable, healthy, and regenerative to our ecosystems here in the state.
