A team of architects in Bengaluru designs beautiful homes built with mud, not cement. They stay cool in summer, while cutting emissions and energy costs.

Bengaluru

In Bengaluru, a city facing rising temperatures and pollution, some residents are turning to mud homes as a sustainable alternative to conventional buildings. Sindhoor Pangal's house, built without cement or steel, uses reusable and natural materials that decompose without leaving a harmful footprint. The structure employs traditional wattle and daub techniques with bamboo and mud, providing insulation against heat and sound while improving indoor air quality.

Most buildings in Bengaluru are constructed with cement, concrete, and steel, contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Mud homes, though about 10% more expensive to build, can lower long-term energy costs by reducing the need for air conditioning. Interest in these eco-friendly homes is growing, with more people visiting to learn about sustainable building practices.

Mud homes beat the heat and pollution in Bengaluru

The windows are small and the walls are meters thick, but unique features still allow plenty of light. Sindhoor Pangal lives in a most unusual house, one built without cement or steel. The walls are made from mud. Most of the materials that we have used are either reusable, it's not one-time materials, so it's either reusable or completely natural, which means that after my time is done, it will decompose into the earth without leaving a nasty footprint behind, which is also important for me. Sindhoor lives on the outskirts of Bagalur, a suburb of Bengaluru. In the city of more than 12.5 million, the summer heat can be unbearable. Back in 2010, the average May temperature was 28 degrees Celsius, today it's 34. Suedes of traffic and concrete only increase temperatures. Sindhoor Pangal wanted an alternative. A team of architects designed her house and spent four years building it. Mud keeps out the summer heat while improving air quality on the inside. For the walls, traditional building techniques were used. This wattle and daub technique is called skin and bone of a structure. So wattle is basically like any wood woven together. For instance, here we have used bamboos. So we had a lot of bamboos cut into strips and weaved together as made as a panel. So it has lots of gaps also. In that gap, we fill it with mud and make it as a skin for it. The porous structure of the mud also provides sound insulation. Sindhoor's house is far from the norm. 93% of Bengaluru is concrete jungle. Buildings here are made from cement, concrete and steel. And their production uses huge amounts of energy. Around one third of greenhouse gas emissions in India come from the construction and operation of conventional buildings. Architect Sridevi Changali finds numbers alarming. Those buildings are hot boxes. You have just your concrete floor plates and you're just enveloping it in glass. There's nothing to do but to air condition it. How much energy you're going to require and how much heat that compressor unit is throwing out is just, it's not only the energy consumed, it's also the heat that is being thrown out from the insides of these buildings. In Shulagiri, 70 kilometres from Bengaluru, the architect and her team are working on another project. Again, the principal material is mud. It usually comes from nearby, which keeps transport costs and the carbon footprint low. Basically using your senses to understand the kind of soil you have on site. But the quality varies depending on the location, so before it can be used, the mud has to be tested. So clearly this is more gravelly. Basically using your senses to understand the kind of soil. The architects use the results to determine how much cement needs to be mixed in to make it more stable. Instead of using increasingly scarce sand, they add quarry dust. Then we wet it to a humid mix, so it's not a very plasticky texture, it's just enough to kind of mould it into something and to activate the clay in the soil. We make the wet mix and then we pour it into our shuttering. So this wall that you see is actually a shuttering that is of this length. And then we keep doing it layer by layer. The plan is to keep the walls like this. The architects tell us that the house owner doesn't intend to change anything in terms of colour or surface. The team also uses mud on the roof, in the form of bricks. It's nine inch thick and it has a beautiful thermal mass, so it really blocks the heat and it slows the penetration of heat by a lot while you're building it. Back at the mud house of Sindhur Pangal near Bengaluru, even for the walls surrounding the property, the architects looked for a sustainable solution and finally found one. These stones are sourced locally from the quarries. These are all waste stones, they're not actually of good size and all. So these are like, after cutting the rocks into a perfect shape, you get waste pieces. The costs for building with mud are indeed about 10% higher than conventional building. But long term, home owners save electricity costs on air conditioning in summer. Sindhur Pangal has never regretted the move to her mud house on the city's outskirts. I wanted to create something where others can learn from it. So I wanted to create a space which would be a learning space and at the end of it also showcase what is possible with mud. And interest is clearly growing because she regularly gets visitors who want to learn more about sustainable building with mud.

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