Thannal Hand Sculpted Homes is a natural building awareness group which started up at Tiruvannamalai some years ago to experiment in and teach awareness of natural building methods and materials. As well as creating unusual, organic homes in this area, Thannal Hand Sculpted Homes also offers regular workshop to inculcate their building methods to interested parties.
One of their recent projects was in creating a 550 sq ft (52 sq metre) superadobe home in Tiruvannamalai. It took one and a half months and was made using some 1000 earth bags of soil from the site. To produce the 1000 bags it took around 15 days by 2 men and 2 women and was more economical than baked bricks. Thannal used different plaster, mortar paste mixes made out of Prickly pear juice, aloe vera, tamarind seed, Haritaki, sticky rice juice and tapioca starch.
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| Creating an Earthbag House |
To view their Earthbag Home video at Tiruvannamalai, check out their link here. For a large selection of different natural building videos at Tiruvannamalai, visit their You Tube channel at this link. Their website can be found here.
