Sustainable Building with Earth

This book provides an insightful overview of the current state of earth building. The author approaches the subject from the perspective of the building material’s life cycle, featuring in-depth explanations of the cycle's individual steps: extraction and classification of construction soil; production of earth building materials and earthen structures; planning, construction and renovation of earth buildings; and demolition and recycling of earthen structures. This unique resource provides examples of sophisticated earth building projects and illustrates the diverse applications of earth as a building material. Compared to conventional mineral building materials, earth possesses particularly positive ecological qualities such as its energy balance and recyclability. Architects, engineers, students, manufacturers and distributors of building materials, building contractors, building biologists, public authorities and preservationists will benefit from this book’s ample coverage of restoring, optimizing and building with this material of the past, present and future.

Dr.-Ing. Horst Schroeder is a founding member of the German Association of Building with Earth (Dachverband Lehm e. V.). For twenty years he was the chairman of the association and has been its honorary president since 2012. Up to 2012, he was a lecturer in the fields of “earth building” and “planning and building in developing countries” at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany. He has been active in research and teaching and has worked as a consultant for various German and international organizations.