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 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.

The educational building site inaugurated in Casaprota, Italy, to host last July’s LearnBIØN workshop #2 will be the location for further initiatives:

BIØN-partner AK0 is organizing RENDER01, a three-days workshop open to architects, building professionals or self-constructors who want to learn more about natural finishes for internal and external walls. The workshop will take place next November from Friday 10th till Sunday 12th

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.

On Thursday, 13th of April, LearnBIØN Workshop #2 (Build and Design with wattle-and-daub and light straw) has officially been lanced in Casaprota, central Italy. AK0-chairman Arch. Stefan Pollak met Marcello Ratini, mayor of Casaprota and Arch. Renato Vivaldi Tesser, chairman of SabinArti, the local partner organisation, for the project start.

Saturday 18th of February the AK0-team together with a group of volunteers have started to harvest the canes needed for the raw-earth walls they are planning to build in next July. The canes have been sourced on a private estate in the hilly Sabina region, 60km north-east from Rome and only some hundred metres from the future building site in the town of Casaprota that will host the workshop.