Fambidzanai House

Fambidzanai Permaculture Centre has been pushing the limits of permaculture in southern Africa for more than 30 years. In 1996 we were invited to facilitate a series of workshops using the waste material left over from their brick and earth block making projects. Rammed earth can accept quite coarse material for building while bricks and blocks need to be sieved. This was an opportunity to make something from nothing.

Initially the training courses were for a day or two, building simple samples with an opening or corner detail. Soon the centre asked us to consider something more ambitious, a building to house one of the centre managers, to be built by paying trainees. This had benefits for trainees and for the centre, the chance to work on a real building for trainees and a building built and paid for by trainees for the centre, a win win situation.

So three weeks of workshops were planned, each group started on a Monday morning and worked setting out footings, setting out formwork and then building up walls for the week. We planned to ensure everyone got to do a bit of everything although the foundations had been marked out and dug before the first week.

It was hard work dealing with a new group of trainees each week, the same explanations, same difficulties overcome the week before all over again. Hard to remember what had been said to

one group and ensure it was said to the next.

There were some nice elements to the build. We had prepared two sets of formwork, one from bought plywood and timber, the other from packing cases for importing sheet glass. The ply had to be fixed with bought screws, the packing cases came with their own nails and coach bolts, carefully recovered while dismantling the boxes. Both sets did the same thing, that is could join onto the set below, make corner pieces and build up vertically.

The lintels over windows and doors were made from the off-cuts of roof poles, two side by side and one smaller one on top to fill the gap between the two below. The poles were bedded down on soft material before ramming and behaved very well. One spine wall internally was rammed earth, all the other dividing walls were made from the centres block making project, thinner and non load bearing.

The building followed our publication Rammed Earth Structures a Code of Practice while it was still in preparation as the Zimbabwe National Standard on Rammed Earth Structures, later the SADC harmonised code covering 15 countries, 460m people. Foundations included lime burnt in the process of producing iron and steel, a great product under used and therefore about a quarter of the price at that time of cement. Cheaper still because cement products typically start at around 7% cement content while for soil stabilisation 7% is the upper limit. Still we only used it for the foundations with a damp proof course between that and the unstabilised walls above.

Fambidzanai had its own in house building team which could handle a range of different materials and structures. They assembled the roof structure and thatched it and then finished the building after placing ground and first floors.