Workshop 5 has started!

The first week has passed at the Design and Build with Rammed Earth course in Valverde de Burguillos (Extremadura, Spain). The whole group of participants (17 people from 9 different countries) gathered on sunday 15th and had their first contact with the local vernacular architecture through a “rural sketching” activity. Also several small group exercices and dynamics helped us to start knowing each other.

On monday 16th, after an introduction of the team of trainers and partners of the project (City Council and Asociation Activa Valverde), the program of the workshop was presented to the participants, highlighting the practical part that would consist in building of a small library: a book storage and a reading aerea for the municipality, in the park of the pool.

Then the work on the building site started and lasted until the end of the weeks, with some interruptions to do some theoretical courses about earth building in general and in particular rammed earth building process and design.

After one week of work the building is allready taking shape: the cylinders of the reading aerea (“tapial digital” bench) are almost finished and regarding the storage place, the first elements of rammed earth have been built on the stone footings that had been previously realized before the workshop by a building company of the aerea.

A really nice energy is allready starting to appear between all the persons engaged in the project, and also together with Valverde’s inhabitants, that makes us really satisfied and excited to continue!