Oct 5, 2014 | Construction Blogs, Natural plaster, Straw bale building, Teachers' Union offices
Sustainable New Construction 2014 student Ben Bowman set up his camera and took some great sequences of the construction process at our teachers’ union office project. Here are the two sequences of straw bale installation and earthen plastering. In many ways,...
Aug 17, 2014 | Construction Blogs, Natural building materials and techniques, Straw bale building, Teachers' Union offices
Wood framing is a conventional building practice that we use quite frequently at Endeavour. For the teachers’ union project, we are using wood framing for both the floor system and the exterior walls. The walls and floors may not look very different from...
Aug 17, 2014 | Building Product Reviews, Construction Blogs, Natural building materials and techniques, Teachers' Union offices
The timber frame portion of our project for the teachers’ union rests outside the walls of the building, requiring individual foundation piers for each of the 14 posts. Typically, these would be poured concrete piers each with its own wide footing, resulting in...
Aug 17, 2014 | Building Product Reviews, Construction Blogs, Natural building materials and techniques, Teachers' Union offices
Over the past few years, we have turned to Durisol (now Nexcem) insulated concrete forms (ICFs) several times. They offer an attractive blend of sustainable features with the convenience of conventional methodology. For the teachers’ union office project, we...
Jan 19, 2014 | Circle Organic Farm Building, Construction Blogs
Our 2013 project at Circle Organic farm involved constructing a large, root cellar-style vegetable storage facility attached to the vegetable processing barn. Our research showed us that small subterranean root cellars have a long history, but that the principle has...
