Sustainable and eco-friendly ideas are always welcoming and encouraging. And, a great example of it is this eco-building designed by students with Moroccan hemp.
This design actually entered in an international Solar Decathlon and it works without an electrical grid and uses all-natural materials for its construction.
Meet the Sunimplant Hemp House Project
This single-family dwelling was designed by students from Morocco in a contest that was organized by the US Department of Energy & the Centre de recherché en Energie solaire et Energies nouvelles from Morocco.
This contest is organized bi-annually and students attempt to come up with the best innovative buildings powered by solar energy.
The Hemp House competed in the first Solar Decathlon which took place in Africa at Ben Guerir in Morocco. The students have to be both the designers and constructors of the project.
This hemp home, designed with rural development in mind, it’s also great for urban settings. It’s a futuristic home with decorative panels which hit the intricate fibers of the hemp materials which was used.
According to Monika Brummer, the head of the project, an architect and natural builder, says that this advanced building reflects a turn not just in North Africa, but in hemp construction, which doesn’t have comparable prototypes elsewhere in the world.
No Usage of Synthetic Materials
The challenge that the competitors were faced was to make hemp composite with vegetable-based bio resins. They didn’t use technical or synthetic components, explains Brummer.
It’s a hemp house made in a circular design with a cylindrical envelope to reduce the exposure for the 24 solar panels. They use optimal damping and thermal phase shift to improve the comfort of the interior.
Their ‘hempcrete’ material combined locally-sourced hemp, pozzolan, earth, and lime. The added hemp fibers used vacuum injection tech for the production. Moreover, its cost was less than half of the cost of those by their competitors, i.e. around $120,000.
The team also wanted to use hemp-clay boards for the floor and internal partitions; however, they lacked the funds to do it.
The major contributors to the project were Morocco’s National School of Architecture and National School of Applied Sciences, Germany’s Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics, and Adrar Nouh.
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