Mud house - 4

This is a continuation from the blogpost, Mud house - 3 where we looked at 'The site' and 'The walls'. We now go on to discussing the next steps.

3. Plastering & Flooring
Preparation of the floor and plastering of the walls is carried out at the same time. It is a task usually undertaken by women. A mud floor is usually 4 cm thk. The plinth comprises of earth that has been excavated from the foundation trench. To obtain a 30cm high plinth, more earth may be acquired from the surrounding areas.

In order to avoid cracks on drying, sand is mixed with the mud in the proportion of 1:5 i.e. 1 part sand to 5 parts earth for plastering as well as for the flooring mix. For plastering and flooring together, no.of persons required are 8 women for completing the work in 1 day. The mud floor is allowed to dry for a day and then cowdung is spread on the mud floor. The walls are whitewashed from the inside and the outside. The whitewash may be available in packets of 3 kg. The walls of a 3.0m diameter house usually require 4 packets of whitewash.

4. Roof
Whilst the wall is being constructed, the wooden members that make up the loft are placed on the wall before the last 60cm of wall is raised so that these palmyra members get embedded in the wall. As soon as the wall upto 1.8m height is completed, the midhi or loft may be constructed. This comprises of 4 beams in palmyra placed across the room with battens spanning across the beams. The battens rest side by side so as to leave minimum gaps between them. This is then covered with 8cm of mud layer. Over the midhi, a support system is built in order that the palmyra members forming the core may rest on it.

The roof frame uses Palmyra, Sarvi and Ruvvala wood. Near Haripuram, the village in Visakhapatnam district where this mud house was built, Ruvvala was freely available but the charge for carrying each bundle to the site of construction had to be paid. The roof frame used 6 bundles of Ruvvala. The number of palmyra trees that were used for the pitched conical roof structure were four. It is preferable to buy the wood in wholesale i.e. to purchase the trees and have them cut as per requirements.

Mud house - 3

This part of the Mud house series focuses on the following :
1. The Site
The site is selected and then cleaned. Construction work begins with digging a 30cm deep trench as per the required circular plan. This layout is marked at site by placing a pole in timber at a point which may be the centre of the circle. This is fixed temporarily. A thread tied to it, the other end of it holds an iron rod. This end is moved around to mark the circle on the ground. A 45cm wide trench is dug. The earth excavated is thrown into the circle and this becomes the filling for the required 30cm high plinth of the house. The trench is only 30cm deep since here at Haripuram village, the soil is rocky. The number of persons required for this task are four and the duration of work is one day.

2. The Walls
The walls are built in mud by the cob wall technique i.e. earth is mixed with water thoroughly with hands and also feet to form the right consistency. Next, balls of mud are placed into the trench to build up the wall. At a time i.e. in one day, only 60cm height of wall may be erected. It is allowed to dry, before the next 60cm of wall is built on the following day.

Since no further construction takes place that day, the time is utilised for the mixing of the earth and water to be used for subsequent construction. The soil mix must be sufficiently clayey. In case of difficulty in obtaining clayey soil, it is carted from the neighbouring areas. However, such a need occurs rarely.

Mud house - 2

The layout of the round mud house was always the same. It comprised of a circular inner room which was used mainly for storage of grain and all the main belongings of the household. During winter, this room was also used for sleeping. In the summer, the family slept outdoors or on the spactious verandah that was a part of every house. Enveloping this inner room, in plan, was another circle which served on the left as the kitchen and on the right as a store room or a sitting/sleeping area. The circular house was based on the concept of a verandah and again verandah.


The inner room received light only through the door to the room. Because of the extremely low overhang of the thatch roof, it was better not to have windows. And the low overhang was to protect the mud walls from the rains. The roads leading into a hamlet were the usual narrow mud paths, opening into large open spaces, around which mud and thatch huts lay strewn.

The children were always outdoors unless they were at school, which was a basic one, and yet not all families could afford to send their children to school. Some children continued to play in their verandahs or just outside their homes waiting for the school bell to ring when the other children would join them.

























While the children played in the sun, the mother cooked on the common chulahs (stoves) built by them in the open spaces. These had been made in the same earth that had built their homes. Wood was used as fuel.

























While the rice cooked, some women were busy within the house, cleaning, or putting a little one to sleep. They moved back and forth from indoors to outdoors, making transitions through spaces and making similar transitions through the day from family responsibilities to social intermingling.

























The design principles that had been followed in the layout of the coastal andhra houses allowed these interactions amongst families. It was a way of life that they had always followed. Often, roof overhangs of adjoining houses touched, but one bent a little to go beyond, on the mud path that lead between them.

Mud house -1

This is the first part of a series of blogposts on an experiment in mud construction that was carried out in the village of Haripuram, near Visakhapatnam. The traditional coastal andhra village was typically a cluster of round mud houses. The houses were built close to each other in a circular formation so that the cyclonic winds that often hit the coast bounced off tangentially away from the cluster. Houses with two family units were often roofed and walled in rectangular form.

























The old houses in Haripuram were more than thirty years old and they had mud walls and palmyra thatch roofs. However, the new constructions being built used reinforced cement concrete slabs and burnt brick walls. Initially, the possibility of constructing a two-storeyed mud house was discussed to bring back mud as a viable building material. For this, a manual block-making machine would have to be purchased. This required a higher budget for our first experiment. Also, the local masons would need to undergo special training. It was then decided that a single-storeyed mud and thatch house with a few of its drawbacks eliminated would perhaps be a better way to begin.

It was hoped that such a model house would evoke confidence in the people to learn to improvise on their ways of building. It would be clear that the new house which didnot have the disadvantages of the old houses had only incorporated a few simple changes, but was in all other respects like their earlier houses which they knew how to build anyway. I started to sketch the mud houses in the village.

Sculpting the house

A space within a house is sculpted the moment the plan is conceptualised. It is the sequence of the many small spaces within the house that link with each other that is important. The place to invite guests, the place to eat, the place to rest for the night, the place to study and the place to ponder and to relax are each important and need to be detailed out differently.

These spaces are defined with the position of the walls and how they relate to each other. It then becomes important to decide what openings will puncture these walls, the window openings that will allow natural light to filter in, the openings that will allow a glimpse into the landscape outside and the door openings that will allow movement of people from one room to the other.

A house has an ‘inside aesthetic’ and an ‘outside aesthetic’. Some people like a contemporary outside aesthetic reflecting an international architectural style with an ethnic inside aesthetic with interiors that reflect indian craftsmanship. There are others who would like an indian aesthetic on the outside with sloping terracotta tiled roofs but are comfortable with a modern interior that reflects their contemporary lifestyle.

A design of a house is most appropriate for each of us when it gives us places to be comfortable in our moments of sharing and our moments of solitude.