The walls of the home are red, as red as the Moab desert. The walls are the color of the surrounding earth because they are made of the surrounding earth. Rammed earth, one of the world's oldest construction methods, has come to Utah.
The home belongs to Jean and Mike Binyon. The Salt Lake couple bought property in Moab several years ago, then began planning a place to retire.Their house should make as little impact as possible on the environment. They wanted to use a minimal amount of timber. They read about rammed earth in the library and thought it would be as pretty as adobe, yet more sturdy and sustainable. They liked the idea that their home could be built of such cheap and handy material: the dirt from their own front yard.
From what they'd read, they knew they needed an architect. Though rammed earth is experiencing a renaissance in New Mexico and California, no one in Utah was familiar with the building process.
Rammed earth does bring certain challenges. For one thing, the house has to be placed carefully on the site. Moisture must drain away from the walls. Another concern: The windows and doors must be placed exactly. After the walls are up, you can't cut out another door, the way you could in a wood frame wall.
The building method itself is simple -- damp dirt is dumped into frames and tamped down tight. Ten inches of earth gets compacted into 4 or 5 inches. Eventually the soil is as solid as cement. The frames leave spaces for doors and windows.
The Binyons hired architect Kenton Peters. Peters, who had never built with rammed earth before, began his research with a trip to Morocco. He began by appreciating the beauty of this ancient building art. "It looks like layered stone," says Peters. "The bedding of it." The surface is rich, striated.
David Easton, of Rammed Earth Works construction company in Napa, Calif., wrote a book about the process. He traces the method back to ancient civilizations -- Jericho, Babylon, the Great Wall of China -- and says rammed earth has been used continuously for 6,000 years in the Far East.
It has long been popular in Europe, as well, brought to the Rhone River valley by the Romans. Today, throughout France, the most quaint and charming farmhouses are "pise de terre." Block of earth.
Peters took the Binyons to New Mexico so they could see rammed earth for themselves. Mike Binyon says he and his wife were sold instantly. They visited a house next to a freeway, stood inside the 2-foot-thick walls of the living room, and couldn't hear a sound.
Binyon notes, "Easton builds very expensive houses in California. The houses being built currently in New Mexico are very inexpensive."
The Binyons' house ended up in between. Certainly not as inexpensive as they wanted it to be. And perhaps not quite as easy on the environment.
Binyon says they didn't factor in the foundation. It must be wide and deep, and uses a lot of concrete. They also need to add cement to the dirt -- which they ended up quarrying from a site a few miles away because the dirt on their lot was not the right consistency.
They didn't have any trouble finding a contractor. Tom Rees had worked with Peters on a straw bale home in Moab. Rees hired a New Mexico crew, "who'd done it before" and owned special power mixing/tamping equipment.
Rees reports the work goes quickly -- "You can fill a 10-foot-long wall in about an hour" -- and the pneumatic tamper is lighter and less exhausting to use than a jackhammer. He likes the way the walls look: pretty, massive.
Peters' design is just what they wanted, the Binyons say. They wanted a courtyard. They got two -- designed to give them a warm sunny outdoor space in the winter and shade in the summer. They wanted lots of wall space to display their art. They got big walls -- as well as windows with a view of the Moab Rim. They wanted energy efficiency. They got that, too.
The earth walls offer massive solar mass, Peters explains. Since heat moves from the warmest to the coolest place, it can take all day for the hot air of a Moab summer to make its way through a rammed wall. Just about the time it reaches the interior of the house, the sun goes down and the heat starts moving the other direction.
In the winter, if Moab temperatures stay unusually cold for several days, the Binyons will be glad to have artificial heat, Peters says. The home will have radiant heat in the floors.
Peters says there are drawbacks to rammed earth, especially in cold climates. The Wasatch Front is colder than Moab and also at greater risk of an earthquake. If someone were to build with rammed earth in the northern valleys, they'd need insulation on the outside or inside of the wall. The walls would also have to be reinforced with rebar. (Which would complicate the tamping, in Peters' opinion.)
The Binyons' home will be finished by June. The walls will be sandblasted, then sprayed with a water-proof sealant. The sealant will bring out the red color, which was dulled somewhat by the addition of cement.
But for now, the walls stand alone. Solid and rammed and awaiting a roof. In their solitary state they are strangely impressive, says Binyon. "They look a little bit like Stonehenge."