Mud homes beat the heat and pollution in Bengaluru

DW (English)

A team of architects in Bengaluru designs beautiful homes built with mud, not cement. They stay cool in summer, while cutting emissions and energy costs.

Transcript

00:00The windows are small and the walls are meters thick but unique features still

00:07allow plenty of light. Sindhul Pangal lives in a most unusual house, one built

00:15without cement or steel. The walls are made from mud.

00:19Most of the materials that we have used are either reusable, it's not one-time

00:24materials, so it's either reusable or completely natural which means that after

00:28my time is done it will decompose into the earth without leaving a nasty

00:32footprint behind which is also important for me. Sindhul lives on the outskirts of

00:37Bagalur, a suburb of Bengaluru. In the city of more than 12.5 million the summer

00:43heat can be unbearable. Back in 2010 the average May temperature was 28 degrees

00:50Celsius, today it's 34. Swathes of traffic and concrete only increase temperatures.

00:57Sindhul Pangal wanted an alternative. A team of architects designed her house and spent

01:05four years building it. Mud keeps out the summer heat while improving air quality on

01:11the inside. For the walls traditional building techniques were used.

01:15This wattle and dob technique is called skin and bone of a structure. So, wattle is basically

01:23like any wood woven together. For instance, here we have used bamboos. So, we had a lot

01:30of bamboos like cut into strips and weave together as made as a panel. So, it has lots of gaps

01:36also like in that gap we fill it with mud and make it as a skin for it. The porous structure

01:42of the mud also provides sound insulation. But Sindhu's house is far from the norm.

01:4893% of Bengaluru is concrete jungle. Buildings here are made from cement, concrete and steel.

01:56And their production uses huge amounts of energy. Around one third of greenhouse gas emissions

02:02in India come from the construction and operation of conventional buildings. Architect Sridevi

02:09Changali finds numbers alarming.

02:11Those buildings are hot boxes. You have just your concrete floor plates and you're just

02:17enveloping it in glass. There's nothing to do but to air condition it. How much energy you're

02:23going to require and how much heat that compressor unit is throwing out is just, it's not only the

02:31energy consumed, it's also the heat that is being thrown out from the insides of these buildings.

02:36In Shulagiri, 70 kilometres from Bengaluru, the architect and her team are working on another

02:43project. Again, the principal material is mud. It usually comes from nearby which keeps transport

02:50costs and the carbon footprint low. Basically using your senses to understand the kind of soil

02:56you have on site. But the quality varies depending on the location. So before it can be used,

03:02the mud has to be tested. Basically using your senses to understand the kind of soil.

03:08The architects use the results to determine how much cement needs to be mixed in to make it more

03:14stable. Instead of using increasingly scarce sand, they add quarry dust. Then we wet it to a humid mix.

03:23So it's not a very plasticky texture or anything. It's just enough to kind of mould it into something

03:29and to activate the clay in the soil. We make the wet mix and then we pour it into our shuttering.

03:35So this wall that you see is actually a shuttering that is of this length and then we keep doing it

03:40layer by layer. The plan is to keep the walls like this. The architects tell us that the house owner

03:47doesn't intend to change anything in terms of colour or surface. The team also uses mud on the roof in the form of bricks.

03:59It's nine inch thick and it has a beautiful thermal mass. So it really blocks the heat

04:05and it slows the penetration of heat by a lot while you're building it.

04:09Back at the mud house of Sindhur Pangal near Bengaluru. Even for the walls surrounding the property,

04:16the architects looked for a sustainable solution and finally found one.

04:24These stones are like sourced locally from the quarries. Like these are all waste stones. They're

04:29not actually of good size and all. So these are like after cutting the rocks into a perfect shape,

04:36you get waste pieces. The costs for building with mud are indeed about 10% higher than conventional

04:42building. But long term, homeowners save electricity costs on air conditioning in summer. Sindhur Pangal

04:49has never regretted the move to her mud house on the city's outskirts. I wanted to create something

04:56where others can learn from it. So I wanted to create a space which would be a learning space

05:01and at the end of it also showcase what is possible with mud.

05:05And interest is clearly growing because she regularly gets visitors who want to learn

05:10more about sustainable building with mud.

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