Mud Homes Making a Comeback
Written by Euphrasia Carroll
In ancient Egypt, many homes were made of mud. To be more precise, these homes were constructed of mud bricks – building blocks made of mud mixed with straw, formed in wooden molds, and then baked in the sun to dry. Often, the mud-brick walls were whitewashed to deflect the sun’s intense heat and light. In the towns, mud-brick houses could be multi-storied to make most of limited land.
Ilene Springer writes, “The typical house, such as the ones excavated at the workman’s village in Upper Egypt, were squarish in shape and consisted of three main rooms—a sleeping area, living area, and a yard which acted as an outside kitchen with a cylindrical, baked clay oven.”
Mud is making a comeback as a building material well-suited for the 21st century. Mud bricks, or cob, was first used for construction in north Africa – notably, in Egypt – as far back as the 11th century. Some 300 years later it had become the standard building material in the UK and other parts of the world.
In winter, the thick walls made of mud bricks retain the heat generated within the home by fire or furnace. In summer, the walls stay cool, so the interior retains a comfortable temperature even when it’s hot outside.
“Hundreds of years ago, when cob was first ‘discovered’ as a building material, the mud and straw was trampled by oxen before being pitchforked into place and then trimmed after drying for up to nine months. Today's builders use cement mixers, but otherwise apply the material in much the same way - and they insist it is the perfect material for green construction,” writes Graham Norwood in In Mud, Glorious Mud: Homes Made of Earth, an article featured by the Organic Consumers Association.
Adobe is another version of mud building material. Affordable Adobe tells readers, “Adobe is a traditional building material used for millennia in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest, where the pueblo people used it to construct their homes well before the Spanish came. Taos Pueblo, which is built entirely out of adobe, is the oldest, continuously inhabited dwelling place in North America. Adobe is usually made out of earth, sand, straw, and water, which is mixed into ‘mud,’ formed into bricks, and baked in the sun.”
A video depicting the construction of mud houses typical in Bangladesh is available at MetaCafe.
With this brief tour of mud homes around the world, it’s easy to see human ingenuity at work, using the materials at hand for constructing one of life’s necessities: shelter. In reaching to the earth for its bounty, mud was – and continues to be – an obvious choice for building materials that offer economy and harmony with nature.
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