From Reuters Alertnet.org - NEWSDESK
By Anton Ferreira
FEATURE
Architect battles to spread quake-safe adobe houses
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Iran-born architect Nader Khalili has a technique for building earthquake-proof houses, but he is struggling to sell it to governments even though he teaches it for free and it could save countless lives.
Called "superadobe," it uses nothing more sophisticated than sandbags and barbed wire, and it has been approved as quake-safe by the hard-to-please building authorities on California's seismic fault line.
Khalili hopes to put the technique into practice in places like his native country, where an earthquake last month killed more than 30,000 people.
But as simple, secure and cheap as superadobe appears to be, Khalili has battled for more than a decade to get the technique widely implemented -- with little success.
The problem, he says, lies in the reluctance of bureaucrats to accept an idea that is not based on conventional steel and concrete. "The only things they accept are imitations from the West," Khalili said in an interview.
Superadobe takes an ancient technique -- building with earth -- and improves upon it.
Soil dug from the construction site is mixed with a small amount of cement and water and rammed into tubular bags which are laid one on top of the other to form walls.
Barbed wire is placed between the layers to hold the bags together and provide reinforcement. In the simplest form of superadobe, the bags are laid in a circle about 12 feet (four metres) across. The diameter of the rows gradually decreases towards the top.
The result is a self-supporting dome, a traditional building form in much of the Middle East and Mediterranean. Superadobe can be used to build a one-room structure, or by combining the domes, more complicated multi-room houses.
As Khalili notes, the dome is so inherently stable it is used almost universally as the shape of containment structures for nuclear reactors.
U.N. SUPPORT
U.N. experts are among those who have been impressed by superadobe.
"It's one of those simple things that are slow to be adopted because they don't make a lot of money for anyone...The battle is to get enough people to know about this kind of building," Nassrine Azimi, head of the U.N. Institute for Training and Research, said in a Reuters interview in 1999.
More recently, Omar Bakhet, director of the emergency response division at the U.N. Development Program, called superadobe "amazing...a hidden treasure".
Following the earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam last month, Khalili became increasingly determined to bypass governments and aid agency officials and communicate his ideas directly to people at risk.
Khalili, who was born in Iran and lived there until after the revolution against the Shah in 1979, developed superadobe at his non-profit Cal-Earth Institute (www.calearth.org) in Hesperia, California, in the Mojave desert about 50 miles (80 km) east of Los Angeles.
"My goal is to use distance learning through the Internet," he said. "If we could set up a regional centre somewhere like Iran, we can broadcast building classes direct from Cal-Earth," he said.
"We can cut through the bureaucracy and go directly to the people...We could do it with a fraction of the foreign aid that has been offered to Bam."
Khalili said Iran was likely to experience further tragedies like the Bam earthquake, which razed much of the ancient Silk Road city.
"Iran has about 30,000 villages and small towns built with mud brick, similar to Bam. It is like 30,000 landmines waiting to be triggered," he said.
It would be impossible for the Iranian government to try to build safe new concrete and steel homes for everyone in those towns.
"The solution lies with the people: If they are empowered with a new technology that is integrated with their traditional technique, like superadobe," Khalili said.
"Bam created a disaster, but in the long term Iran can turn it into a great opportunity, to take the best of the past and build on it, to make traditional techniques better and stronger."
Copyright Reuters
