I spend a lot of time on stumbleupon, which jumps you to various randomly suggested websites, relating to your interests. While I was on there, I found a website that stuck me as very interesting, so i thought I'd share it here, and talk about it a bit.
earthbagplans.wordpress.com is a website put up by an architect who specializes in houses built using the earth-bag technique. The Basic idea is to stack bags filled with dirt to create heavy, well-insulated walls for your house. The bags can then be stuccoed over, to create an adobe-finish, which would blend in in almost any neighborhood (at least here in southern California). It's a very cool idea, the main material for the house is found completely locally, since dirt is just about everywhere, and the thick walls make cooling and heating the home much less expensive, because three feet of dirt insulate every wall. The earthbag houses are incredibly environmentally sound, and are (sorry for this) dirt cheap to build.
All of the environmental stuff is great, but what really made this blog interesting for me, was the fact that the architect Dr. Owen Geiger, made all of the floorplans for these houses available for free on the internet! Every blog post starts with a rendered picture of the particular home, then he has the specifications of the house (sq. footage, #of beds/baths, and the overall footprint of the house), a short description of it, and then the floorplans, right there, available for download! It's an incredibly generous thing to do, especially when you consider how much money architects tend to make.
So, if you're planning on building a house anythime soon, or just appreciate architecture or free things, i encourage you to check out earthbagplans.wordpress.com.
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