As the rammed earth walls continue, the landscaping is showing meaningful progression as the ponds and gardens begin to show their forms.
Nick McHale, contractor of the build, is on site to survey the construction phase of the rammed earth walls. At this stage, the walls have reached 1.8 metres high from the slab.
Through this project, Nick has developed specialist knowledge to bring it to life. Nick consulted with Professor Pete Walker from Bristol University and experts from Australia, among others, to build his knowledge of this technique. He’s now one of the few people in the UK that can deliver this kind of construction.
Nick has created all the rammed earth wall shuttering by hand rather than hiring it in, to ensure it suits the project’s specific requirements. A full-size sample wall panel was then built to get the mix and shuttering design right.
His approach is to use scaffold boards to create the formwork. The team then rams three layers of earth into each scaffold board layer. Each individual layer starts at 5 inches thick, then is rammed down to 3 inches – quite the compression!
Then this is repeated until a full wall height of 3.5 metres is reached.
