Earth Brick
DIY Compressed Stablized Earth Block (CSEB)
4.s43 Thermal Performance in Architectural Enclosures, MIT, Spring 2024
In collboration with Aisha Cheema & Thomas King.
Instructed by Caitlin Mueller, Les Nordford, and Eduardo (Edu) Gascón Alvarez.
The project aims to create a sustainable, modular, and easily deployable compressed earth brick that leverages thermal mass to provide optimal thermal performance for building enclosures. The monolithic brick utilizes air as insulator and optimizes insulation performance by manipulating air pocket size, geometry, and location in relation to the thermal mass. The team used Grasshopper and Transient CHT analysis to conduct an iterative study of the brick air pocket configuration and brick geometry and improve self-shading, thermal performance, and constructability of the brick. We also fabricated three bricks and three material samples from mud to block.
The brick fabrication tested the constructability and material feasibility.We reduce the brick’s weight such that workers can easily assemble a brick wall manually. We also invented a cement-free recipe of clay+sand+straw+water to achive a carbon-free manufacturing process.