Innovative Use of Earth in Construction – Study of Auroville

Abstract

An increase in the cost of construction has been observed in the past consecutive years because of the increasing cost of labour and building materials such as cement, bricks, steel, timber, etc. Use of local resources with varying materials is the need of today, keeping in view the affordability of housing for majority of people. The use of recyclable materials and bringing earth which is available in abundance in nature, if brought into construction may not only affect the costs by lowering it down and also make the construction sustainable. The paper discusses the use of earth as building material with few examples. The scarcity and high cost of conventional building materials like brick, cement, steel, one way to consider and solve severe housing shortage is to put local abundantly available material to use.