Hello everyone...

Two Summers ago, during my travellings, I was living in Austria! Before my great trip by land to India I engaged in some volunteer activites; one of them took place in Güssing, Gratz, Austria. There I helped for a month a family building their own house in a community in the country side...

This is a common type of Natural house, also known as Straw-bale house; in this case a yurt, once its shape is based on the living places built by the nomadic people of Mongolia. A traditional yurt (from the Turkics) or ger (Mongolian) is a portable, round tent covered with skins or felt and used as a dwelling by nomads in the steppes of Central Asia. The structure comprises an angled assembly or latticework of pieces of wood or bamboo for walls, a door frame, ribs (poles, rafters), and a wheel (crown, compression ring) possibly steam-bent. The roof structure is often self-supporting, but large yurts may have interior posts supporting the crown.

The top of the wall of self-supporting yurts is prevented from spreading by means of a tension band which opposes the force of the roof ribs.

Once Austria is known to be a winter country, this permanent yurt must be prepared for those weather conditions. Considering the roof is the area of the house were we can observe an higher loss of heat, on this particular system we built boxes 50cm deep where whe filled with elephant grass!

The roof was then covered with an hemp foil responsible to keep the heat in the boxes in and avoid the outside temperature to percolate. Between the inner hemp-foil and outer rainproof-coloured-foil a 5cm gap was left in order to allow air circulation.

When I arrived most of the skeleton of the house was already built; for a month I helped them mainly with the roof and starting to prepare the next step - the straw-bale walls! Due to pregnancy from the owner of the house the construction had to stop and I couldn't stay to finish the project. However, when in Turkey I helped in another house in the countryside; there I helped continuing the walls with straw and plaster them.

This was the first natural building project I was involved in, since then I discovered my passion for building naturally! :D