Making Pizza Ovens in Amsterdam

Saturday Dec 8th, Saskia and I got up at 5am and drove to Amsterdam! We had a brief pit stop for coffee and croissants which I fell on like a starving waif at 6am and regretted as soon as we arrived at Tierrofino where the most delicious, overly filling food was laid on for us. There were 6 of us on the course, and the group bonded really well. Christo Markham, the leader taught us some really interesting ways to build pizza ovens and had suggestions I'd never have thought of on my own. For example, the clay is less likely to crack if sugar is added to the mix.

This is one they made earlier and the tadelakt'd over to finish..

Free food and a free book! Bonus!

Insulate underneath with upcycled bottles, keep them in place with adobe bricks and popped clay, all stuck down with clay slip.

 Remember to make the base big enough to accommodate walls of 20cm thick and still leave room for a sizable pizza and door..

 
Level out the clay base with a wooden float and then lay the fire bricks and make them level too.

Build up the sand form, trying to keep the sides vertical as long as possible before curving into the roof.

Saskia quality checking the bricks..

 Adobe bricks, clay, sand and sugar mortar, Straw and clay slip insulation. And my enormous winter knitwear, brrrr.

 More clay, sand, sugar render with embedded jute netting to reduce cracks

While you're down there...

Sand all scooped out, looks perfect!

Examples of other amazing things to make with clay, rammed earth and tadelakt:

Hempcrete Retrofit Limburg

Monday it snowed!

With frozen fingers and hair crackling with ice, ten kids from the Antwerp Steiner School and I powered up the industrial mixer and poured kilo after kilo of lime, hemp-shiv, water and kaolin powder into it. A pack and a half of hemp to one bag of pure hydrated lime (30kilos) to about a kilo and a half of kaolin mixed with 35 litres of water makes 8 tubs worth of perfect hempcrete in about 4 minutes. This needed to be hauled upstairs and tamped by hand into the wooden forms. Our mixer was working solidly from 9am to 3pm. As your starter for 10- how many tubs did we haul?

 By the end of the day, I'd developed quite a crush on a teenager, my knuckles were swollen, I'd fallen down the last rungs of the ladder twice, torn my trousers, cut my leg, my nails were cracked, I had shiv in my eyes and I'd accidently punched a few errant screws in the walls when tamping more than once so it's taken all week for my hands to recover and get back to typing. The house looked brilliant when it was finished though and I wasn't the only clumsy one!  I also met my friend Steffi, she's a student at the Steiner school and we worked together in Vermont. It was really fantastic to see her again.

Monday night I stayed over at Peter Vos's house and talked about intelligent architectural things, had a blissfully hot shower and played monopoly the Euro version (I bought Schiphol Airport and Latvia for a bargain €160!)

Strawbale Town House

Friday was a surprise extra day with the Het Leemniscaat team and to make me feel like a real member the boss presented me with a team shirt! It's far too nice and clean to actually wear at work though, I'm saving it for best.

We drove through the frosty winter fog to the outskirts of Brussels to a residential suburban street. Thom and his wife have spent 6 months living in the sitting room of her father's small inner city apartment with their 3 children aged 6, 2 and 4 months while they created a masterpiece of natural building. Tall, narrow, squeezed into a street of townhouses, they have built themselves a timber framed, straw-bale and hempcrete family home. They are hoping to move in before Christmas and although the house looks far from finished, I am sure they will be; they have a steely determination to leave their current living arrangements.

Our job was to render the exposed bales with clay to provide a level of fire protection while maintaining building breathability. They will board over the clay on the ceilings with natural, cement-free gypsum plasterboard so that ceiling lights can be fitted snug. The walls will have a second layer of clay applied and smoothed over which will then remain exposed. They might choose to paint it later with breathable paint or a clay slip but the dry clay itself is a lovely warm terracotta colour.

I have recently discovered that I have a fear of falling from a great height and so given the slack approach to health and safety in Belgium I opted to man the clay mixer for most of the day. It was harder work than the rendering but I preferred it to the light headedly dizzy feeling I got from trying to reach too far from the top of the scaffolding with the palette knife. It was quite a short day though and best of all the sun came out at lunch time so we could all sit outside in the warm. 

This is Adrian, me and Jorn stocking up on sushi, hot tea and the papers for the afternoon.

Update: Finished house pictures, Architect Proud and Homeowners Happy..