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Earth construction in Algeria between tradition and modernity

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posted on 2016-04-01, 09:15 authored by Bousmaha Baiche, Mohamed OsmaniMohamed Osmani, Nicholas Walliman, Raymond Ogden
In the south of Algeria, many indigenous settlements have been built using local earth construction techniques; in the north, despite the availability of suitable earth, only a few rural contemporary settlements have been built using ‘improved’ earth construction. This paper adopts a case study approach to examine and compare structural deficiencies of two earth-built housing settlements in different regions in Algeria. In the indigenous earth settlement in the south, where adobe was used in combination with local timber and stones, the dwellings exhibit many structural defects. Stabilisation of the soil and introduction of modern materials in the contemporary rammed earth settlement in the north has not, however, helped produce structurally adequate dwellings. These dwellings also exhibited many cracks and debonding of rendering, and thus did not fulfil the requirements and aspirations of their occupants. The study concludes that for a potentially successful earth building scheme there are inter-related factors that should be considered: selection of an appropriate soil and construction technique, implementation of a suitable structural design, construction and post-completion processes, availability of relevant skills and provision of adequate training on the construction technique.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Proceeding of the ICE - Construction Materials

Volume

xx

Issue

xx

Pages

xx - xx

Citation

BAICHE, B. ... et al., 2017. Earth construction in Algeria between tradition and modernity. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers: Construction Materials, 170 (1), pp. 16-28.

Publisher

© ICE

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2017

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers: Construction Materials and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1680/jcoma.15.00048.

ISSN

1747-650X

eISSN

1747-6518

Language

  • en

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