The Beauty of Building With Mud and Trash | Vinu Daniel | TED

The construction industry

accounts for 30 to 40 percent

of the world's total energy and resources.

It also accounts for 40 percent of the world's total carbon emissions.

A man who lived long before us gave us a very simple solution.

And he is Mahatma Gandhi, the father of our nation, India.

He said

that the ideal house should be built

with materials found in a five-mile radius around the house.

So you think, OK, what is that material?

And it is right below our feet.

It's mud.

Now imagine, if we can build a house with mud,

there would be nothing more sustainable or eco-friendly than that.

But then, you might ask,

how strong is mud?

This compressed five percent cement-added mud block,

made by my alma mater, Auroville Earth Institute,

is twice as strong as a country fired brick.

In fact, it has a dry compressive strength of 6.5 megapascal,

as compared to a normal fired-brick, which just has 3 to 3.5 megapascal.

But then you may again ask,

what about water?

Wouldn't water destroy mud brick?

This is a brick from the same institute

kept in water since 1995,

a little less than 30 years,

and you can see

that it can still hold a significant amount of load.

So what does this tell us?

Can we change our perception of construction?

Can we imagine a new way of building?

Or can we bring beauty to dirt?

I demoted myself from being an architecture graduate

to being that of a mason.

Or maybe I promoted myself, I don't know.

I joined hands with local workers

and started teaching them mud techniques.

Very soon we started to change every aspect of our construction.

Our foundations became poured earth or rammed earth,

our walls became mud blocks or compressed earth bricks.

Why, even our roofs became domes and vaults made of mud bricks.

This is a brick wall residence called Pirouette House,

which we made in a very crowded community.

So it goes in a zigzag pattern in need of natural ventilation.

Now, please remember that this wonderful parametric form,

or curves,

were made not with any computational technology, AI

or robotic arms.

These were actually made with coconut twigs, thread

and the masons' bear arms.

At a time when the building industry is fast moving

towards a future that exceeds mankind,

we brought the value of human resources back into it.

But way back in 2012,

I was posed with a very life-altering question.

I was asked to build a residence, a low-budget, eco-friendly residence

for a primary school teacher called Biju Mathew.

And when I reached the site, this was what I saw.

A mountain of waste and debris

dumped by the neighbors after they finished their construction.

And because there was no other empty plot.

So what do I do?

Do I stand back and allow this waste to be dumped elsewhere?

Or do I reimagine the philosophy of building

with materials found in my vicinity?

Neither me nor the future generations can unsee the waste

that is getting piled in our vicinity.

Therefore, we decided to use this waste

as a part of our construction technique.

We hand-pulverized this material,

added a bit of soil and again,

five-percent cement.

And using the techniques we learned so far,

we kind of poured it in between two meshes

and poured the entire mixture into it.

The resultant product was not just a formidable partition.

It was load-bearing, means these walls

took the load of the entire roof as well.

But this came at a price.

I was nicknamed “scrap engineer” by locals

who found it amusing to see an engineer search through scrap in the junkyard.

But what I found in the junkyard was pure gold:

this is discarded electric meter boxes,

washing machine wheels,

decaying wood, all became part of a new philosophy

that included more and more waste.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Now, emboldened by this,

our new aim was to build multi-storied mud and waste construction.

Is that possible? Yes.

This is Shikhara, a three-storeyed

multi-story, mud and waste construction.

We decided to further modify what we did in the Biju Mathew residence.

So instead of using two meshes,

we put two wooden shutters

and poured the same mixture which we did in the earlier project.

And the resultant product was as strong as before

and economical too.

This wall had a dry compressive strength of 4.5 megapascal.

And mind you, this building, this residence,

we completed in a meager budget of 90,000 dollars

as compared to a general budget of 200,000 dollars or more.

Very soon --

(Applause)

Very soon, many practices in the country

started adopting this technique,

not just because of its eco-friendly part,

but also because it was cost-effective.

For us Indians,

born to traditional societies,

very often, our dreams culminate in lavish weddings and festivals.

This, by the way, is a wedding stage.

But the very next day, this too, is a common scene.

India discards 3.6 million tons of plastic

every year.

Therefore, we decided to utilize plastic bottles

as a part of our construction for a new project called Chuzhi.

It's a housing project.

And in this project, we started to build circular beams

using plastic bottles and reinforced concrete and of course, mud.

We started to build it in circles.

To be honest, we didn’t know how this would eventually look,

but we still kept on building the circles.

(Laughter)

We made it stable and put a roof on top of it.

You can see how weird this looks.

Chuzhi is a project that resides in a rocky terrain.

And it's populated by a lot of trees and shrubs.

Now, generally,

these two factors are attributed as very bad things for construction.

People generally cut trees

or clear them to make spaces for their rooms or buildings or whatever.

But in here,

the trees not only form shelter

but also cool the building in a tropical climate.

And as far as the terrain was concerned,

generally, people would fill it up, level it, clear it

and build on top of it.

But here,

the building is perfectly camouflaged

in the rocky terrain,

that 10 metres away from this project, you will not see it.

That is how good it is camouflaged.

In this project --

(Applause)

We managed to use 4,300 plastic bottles

which would have otherwise ended up as a landfill

or even worse, in the ocean.

One day, we all got sick working at the site.

We had breathing difficulty and we kind of went to the doctor.

And the doctor very calmly said,

"Ah, it must be the burning tires used in road construction.

Stay away."

And we were shocked.

There are hundreds of kids who travel these roads

every day to their schools.

There are thousands of families who traverse these roads

every day to their jobs,

why some of us even stay on these roads.

And the answer is stay away.

Upon further investigation,

adding to our worst nightmare,

we found out that our country discards

half a million tires in a day.

(Audience murmurs)

No, no, I'm not done yet.

And the rest of the world discards another half a million tires

to India on the same day.

(Audience murmurs)

Yeah.

This is an aerial pic of a tire dump,

seen from space.

This is in a GCC country,

that collects the tires from all of you guys,

and eventually, dumps it in countries like India.

Now you should remember,

all of these tires, most of them at least,

eventually end up either in the road tarring illegal process

or we end up burning it to make again fuel oil,

because this is a petroleum product.

Now, one way to neutralize this huge toxic threat

is to use it as part of construction.

Now inspired from architects like Michael Reynolds,

we introduced mud and tire

to form a new building construction technique.

And now we are building residences,

we are building museums, schools.

And this is the best way to neutralize this threat

and create beautiful construction.

We believe that tomorrow this may also be

the alternative for the housing crisis that is a big reality

for many of our underdeveloped countries.

The heart of every project of ours

lies with the problems that we created amongst us.

Discarded tires,

plastic bottles,

construction debris.

None of these things should be dumped thoughtlessly

or carelessly.

The world can not just find a solution,

but we can even find beauty

in this disaster that we created for ourselves.

I remember a single line

by the poet of my native language, Ulloor,

and it goes like this.

(Speaking Malayalam)

And it translates to this:

It is our choice

whether to build heaven or hell on Earth.

Thank you, thank you.

(Applause and cheers)