Rammed Earth Permaculture Eco-village
Sam’s Village is an ongoing rammed earth project by African Vision Malawi and Cave to design and build an eco, permaculture village.
Sam’s Village teaches vocational building and craft skills while educating about permaculture techniques. Improving employment prospects, crop viability and nutrition in an area of extreme poverty and extreme weather conditions.
This is a unique and innovative opportunity to work with communities in Malawi. The aim is to develop a standard construction detail based on adapting and improving on local building techniques. The method of research is to establish relationships with local craftspeople and builders. Their methods and traditions will be studied and various sites will be visited to see the diversity of Malawian architecture. As a result the knowledge collected will be used to develop a model for future rammed earth building design in Malawi.
Sustainability is a key element running throughout the brief at Sam’s Village. In terms of the villages construction, relationship with its environment, socially and economically.
Because rammed earth walls (aka pise) are constructed by the compacting (ramming) moistened subsoil into place between temporary formwork panels. When dried, the result is a dense, hard, but breathable, monolithic wall.
A vernacular green building material as well as in more recent ‘Eco houses’, rammed earth is an ancient form of construction, usually associated with arid areas. There remain plentiful examples of the form around the world – evidence that rammed earth is a successful and durable way of building. A few historical rammed earth buildings are to be found in the UK.
Community Housing Self Build
Working with a London based community group, wanting to build a strawbale housing development and community centre.
Cave has worked with a London based community group through a series of workshops to help focus their project vision, set up project aims, short and long term goals, as well as to help them produce a booklet for funding purposes. The booklet showcase’s their project to potential investors in a clear and visually stimulating way.
Mixed use development
The development is to comprise of mixed uses; residential, education, leisure, retail and community. It would offer different sized residential units to cater for all family configurations. It would house a small home education classroom, a hall for community activities as well as to generate a rental income, as a venue for hire. To generate income there is a small community cafe on site. The cafe would offer affordable, healthy, locally grown food to the residents and local community. The aim would be to use produce grown on the community allotments and in the gardens. The cafe would also offer vocational training to residents and members of the local community.
Community gardens
The grounds of this community housing project would be cultivated and maintained by the residents. There would be allotments, ornamental food and medicine gardens. As well as open recreational areas. You can see another example of a community garden project created and maintained by residents, designed by Cave on our harmony gardens page. This is a beautiful award winning garden on the Broadwater farm estate in Haringey.
Straw bale building
This building will be built using strawbales, a healthy, natural waste product, that is a wonderful building material. just like big bricks! Strawbales are warm, fire retardent, breathable and great fun to build with. The residents of this housing project would build the buildings themselves with the help of professional builders. The building would be energy efficient, healthy, cheap to run and of a simple construction. Because of this the build would also provide vocational training for residents in building skills.
Putney Vale Estate
This project was a collaborative project between Cave and Melissa Lacide, a free lance community participation enabler. After Cave met with one of the members of the Putney Vale Residents Association, it became clear that they needed some help to discover the needs and possibilities of their community and how they could maximise the use of facilities on the estate for all age groups and ethnic backgrounds.
Cave and Melissa worked up a programme of consultation events. Melissa took on the challenge of consulting the diverse community of the Putney Vale Estate as part of her Masters (which she passed with distinction!) on Sustainable Development at Kingston University. The PVRA very kindly presented a copy of Melissa’s final report as a gift to the Mayor of Wandsworth, Jane Cooper. Hopefully this report will provide them, and perhaps, other community groups too, with a valuable insight into sustainable communities, design thinking and community engagement.
This project is just one example of how the built environment has an impact on how we, as human beings, interact and engage with the places we live in and people who live around us.
Newlands Hall facility on the Putney Vale Estate is now open and running a full programme of events with something for all members of it’s community.
Accessible Adventure Playground
Our client Yorda Adventures is a not-for-profit community organisation that works with families in and around the borough of Kingston-upon-Thames. They provide engaging and stimulating play projects for children and young people with severe learning disabilities.
We designed an adventure playground and landscaping scheme for Yorda to respond to the clients need to provide a natural setting for their activities with the children and young people that they work with. The brief was to create a space that was safe but wild, that was fun and challenging, with areas for quiet meditation as well as excitement. The site is a designated nature reserve with many protected species present, we developed a landscaping scheme that enhanced native flowering and fruiting species to encourage wildlife, provide visual stimulus as well as smelling lovely too!
Their were 8 pieces of equipment finally chosen for their various different sensations; spinning, swinging, sliding, flying, jumping, climbing, calming and splashy!
This project is on site at the moment and two pieces of equipment have been installed, but Yorda are still raising funds to complete the project, so if you would like to help them, please visit the Yorda Adventures website at: http://www.yordaadventures.co.uk/index.htm
Harmony Gardens, Haringey
Our client Back2Earth was asked to improve the space around the Broadwater Farm community centre by creating two new community gardens.
The first to be a vegetable garden, called ‘The Harmony Gardens’ for local residents to grow their own fruit and veg, whilst learning different skills and exercising at the same time. The community centre is also used for many other functions, the local residents also requested a formal garden for recreational use.
The second garden is a children’s garden. An interactive colourful garden for children to become aware of their natural environment through learning where their food comes from and how to grow and prepare it. It also incorporates many biodiversity and habitat features to allow the children to learn about the other plants and creatures we share the planet with and how they can be useful to us as pollinators, predators and composters.
This garden was designed with the local residents and was built completely by volunteers, it is now a thriving hub of all sorts of community activity and provides fresh, locally grown organic food for the cafe based at the community centre.