Soul Seeking: super-adobe in haiti

house in bigones

Shelter is a big issue in Haiti these days. Homes are a status symbol here, and one’s class may be determined by their roof: straw/thatch= lower class, tin/zinc=middle class, concrete=upper class. For this reason, concrete block houses have been considered most desirable and folks will stretch their resources to the limit to have 4 concrete walls and a roof. In most cases, this has resulted in very weak structures, the cement to sand ration way off.

This error was exposed to the world all too blatantly on January 12^th of last year, when the majority of concrete homes came crumbling down in and around Port-au-Prince and Leogane, leaving an estimated 316,000 dead, 300,000 injured and about 1.8 million homeless. A year and a half after that 7.0 earthquake, the cracked, collapsed and piled up remains of these once “high class” structures can still be seen and about 1.5 million people are still living in idp camps.

building process

Needless to say, Haitians are now generally frightened of concrete buildings. In most cases, the rubble where they once stood has been cleared to make way for humble shacks of sheet metal or plastic tarps, where people feel safer. Who knows how long it may take to rebuild this country but, on the positive side, this is a golden opportunity to do it right.

What might be the right way? I would say, one that is affordable, that uses local materials, which withstands hurricanes and earthquakes and that which is appropriate for a hot, tropical climate. Hmmmm…. There is a lot of experimentation going on here at the moment w/ various building methods but one that I find most interesting is super-adobe.

bamboo air vents

Super-adobe is a building technique using long (uncut) rice sacks filled with a mixture of earth, sand and a little cement (optional), which are stacked upon each other (held together with barbed wire) in a circular pattern and tamped down, eventually forming a dome structure with ventilation at the top. Such structures have a lot of thermal mass and the ones that I’ve visited in Haiti were surprisingly cool inside. And, although not traditional in Haitian culture, they are simply beautiful, even by local standards. What’s perhaps most important is that they are virtually disaster-proof and all of the materials can be obtained locally at a reasonable cost.

I had the opportunity to help build one of these structures during a permaculture design course at the GrassRoots United base in Port-au-Prince last month. It was definitely a labor intensive process but, with a good group of people and a little organization, it can actually be pretty fun. Perhaps the best part, though, is sitting back and admiring such a collective work of art as it progresses with each day of hard work. I hope to see more and more super-adobe homes popping up throughout Haiti over the years to come. I might just build my own. ;)