Earth Building UK EBUK have run successful conferences around the country for the past 8 years. This year we are raising our goals and running four days of workshops followed by a conference and tours of local earth buildings. The renaissance of earth building in the UK reflects not only the beauty and utility of the material but also the pressures of rising building costs and the need for lower energy use and waste in building products.
Workshops will be run by experts from England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Iceland and the USA covering a wide range of subjects from earth structures to decorative finishes. Cob, rammed earth, turf structures will be joined by master classes in earth plasters and wood and clay structures to show some of the range of materials and finishes possible.
A local house will host a workshop building a clay wood burning stove, able to heat the house for 24 hours after just two hours of burning. Cob walls with openings will show both simple and applied techniques for building in both wetter and drier climates. Icelandic turf experts will show skills once common across northern Europe and north America.
Joining these workshops will be pop-up sessions from a range of European partner organisations showing adobe and earth blocks and coloured clay plasters. There will be daily shows of a French teaching system showing how earth, air, water and force are able to produce earth structures, from loose grains to solid walls.
The conference will hear papers on new building in Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, new research into products, building in Botswana and Malawi, training and building in China, the USA, Sweden. There will also be papers looking at heritage and linking the new with the old, building on the enormous numbers of buildings across the UK and Ireland and thinking about taking best practice forwards as well as protecting the past.
Clayfest will be a fantastic opportunity for anyone in the building and design world to see materials in use, talk to practitioners, researchers, designers and producers and discover a world of building opportunity.
Clayfest has support from Historic Scotland, The Heritage Lottery Fund and The Tay Landscape Partnership
About EBUK
Earth Building UK are a registered charity working for better understanding, education and wider use of earth as a building material. Established in 2008 EBUK have a membership drawn from the worlds of design, build, academia, producers, self-builders and heritage. EBUK are currently working with European partners towards new training standards for earth building, a new British Standard, as well as guidelines, specifications and energy and health standards After decades in the doldrums the thousands of existing earth structures across the UK and Ireland have a voice and a champion.
The past decade has seen a rise in new build with earth from the Eden Project to Holland Park, recent coverage by Grand Designs and the Financial Times has shown the wider interest growing Changes in legislation and standards make it easier to build with earth too.
Contact:
Rowland Keable
rowland@ebuk.uk.com
07813815869
Tom Morton
tom@ebuk.uk.com
Useful sites:
http://www.ebuk.uk.com/ebuk-2015-clayfest/
http://tickets.historic-scotland.gov.uk/webstore/shop/ViewItems.aspx?CG=HSCG&C=EBUK
http://www.taylp.org/clayfest-saturday-13th-june/
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Murielle Serlet (May 18, 2015). Earth Building UK and Ireland conference and workshop week: CLAYFEST June 8th to 13th 2015. The UNESCO Chair. Retrieved September 13, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/upf2