How can we build with straw? In a workshop in Villasbuenas de Gata, Spain, Actyva-MIGA built a strawbale building for the local community. Prefabricated straw panels were made and assembled on-site. Walls were plastered with clay and lime renders.

The workshop building with Cane, by CanyaViva demonstrated the different steps. Harvesting, cleaning and classifying the cane. Making the arches and assembling, mounting and thatching.

Bion-partner ARCò from Milan just completed another international cooperation that fruited an inspiring building in the Albanian town of Divjake.

Since last Monday all the BIØN partners are gathering again in Montemor-o-Novo for the final event of LearnBIØN. For one week most of the building techniques applied during the workshops held by the network during the last two years have been reproposed in a concentrated workshop with participants from all over Europe.

The techniques that will be the main vehicle for this workshop will be defined along with the design to be co-created by all the participants in the beginning of the week.

We will concentrate on some of the techniques shared abroad during the LearnBIØN program, so skills can be more easily shared with ones getting in contact with them for the first time and improved by the ones who have experienced them.

Last July, during workshop #2 of the LearnBIØN-program, AK0 together with local associations and the municipality of Casaprota have equipped a training location for sustainable architecture within an abandoned building in central Italy.

The last week of the course has arrived. We worked really hard to finish the structure. This week was the time of the secondary nerves that are a bit more sensible than the other elements. We remade all the knots that until now were provisional and that now are definitive.

During the third week of the Design and build with cane course in Valldaura we finally finished the foundation and so we were ready to hoist all the eight main arches!

Another week has passed at the Design and build with cane course in Valldaura. It was the time to prepare the foundation, Vitor and Jonathan worked hard to make four holed that we needed to put four huge wooden poles in which all the arches will be tied with ropes made from sisal.

The first week of Design and build with CANE course has passed! Eight people from Spain, Italy, France, Argentina and Portugal with the challenge of building a structure for theoretical classes of CanyaViva courses in the Natural Park of Collserola, in Valldaura, have arrived. Because of the place where we are building, the biggest challenge is to build only with natural materials.

Rammed earth is a traditional building technique present in many parts of Spain, especially in the south of Extremadura, where most of the villages are built with rammed earth and painted with lime. This beautiful vernacular architecture is today under threat of extinction in spite of the countless benefits of raw earth, a local and low transformed material with high comfort regulation properties.

Course postponed to March 4th to 31st 2018 due to bureaucratic issues. Design and Build with Cane is a 4 week building workshop. During the workshop we will build a cane building for a training center in natural building.

Last weekend AK0 together with a small team of volunteers and trainees got back to Casaprota where the association had build a small multipurpose building as the result of LearnBIØN workshop#2 during the month of July.

On July 28th 2017 the BIØN-team leaded by AK0 with the help of the local partner association Sabinarti delivered the outcome of LearnBIØN workshop#2 to the local community of Casaprota, the small town in central Italy that has hosted the workshop.

LearnBIØN workshop#2 is getting in the final face. Since a few days the little training-prototype is being wrapped with a natural insulation layer. We decided for 80mm wood-fibre panels which we protect with a diffusive yet waterproof membrane. The panels are entirely made of wood and easy to cut on site.

Time is running in Casaprota! During the third week new members joined the team and their help was very useful to complete some key goals.

We finally got the insulation panels in wood fiber and the steam barrier; putting them on site was quite fast and after that we could install the last wall layer, a quincha panel covered with earth, sand and straw just on the external surface.

The LearnBIØN course #2 focused on lightweight constructions in earth building. While the first days were dedicated to explore an adjusted version of wattle-and-daub-techniques, in a second step the workshop-participants got the possibility to learn about lightweight, monolithic walls made of straw and raw earth.

One of the question marks our network deals with is which local resource is suitable for which productive reality. On one hand the use of natural materials is an invitation for manual work: the processed products are mainly nontoxic and most of the techniques are simple enough to be learned by everyone with the right motivation and a few purposeful training sessions.

We are definitely going into the hot phase of the workshop Design and Build with Wattle-and-Daub and Light Straw. The second week is over, after some hours of hard work and fascinating discoveries about our principal material, the earth. We are proud to announce that we made impressive progress!

The first week of LearnBIØN course#2 Design and Build with Wattle-and-Daub and Light Straw is concluded. An enthusiastic group of participants from different countries and with different professional backgrounds have had the possibility to assess the features of locally available earth samples through empirical tests, to understand the working principle of a wattle-and-daub frames build with the quincha-technique and to accomplish all the necessary working steps for it practically.