A n unplastered papercrete
wall in Linda Beranek’s tiny
house shows how new con-
struction can look like the
layers of an ancient city
undergoing excavation.
A n archway in the greenhouse at Eve’s G arden, owned by Kate Thayer, beckons the explorer to experience an astonishing array
of papercrete mastery. www.evesgarden.org
PAPERCRETE
By Danielle Gallo
T
he thing about common sense is
that it tends to be less than com-
mon. In this moment in history,
in this society, we excrete into our
potable water, eat food that has to be
transported from other continents and
build our houses mostly out of wood of
a decreasing quantity and quality.
These practices are not only common
but are frequently dictated by law, and
are hardly sensible.
4
Thankfully, I live in an unincorporat-
ed village with no building codes, so I’m
free to build houses out of whatever I
please. The Big Bend isn’t known for its
surplus of trees, but we do have an
amazing amount of trash around here.
That’s why I love to build with paper-
crete.
Papercrete, as many West Texans are
aware, is made by pulping used paper
and mixing it with Portland cement and
Cenizo
Second Quarter 2018
The Hostel at La Loma del C hivo, owned by G uilford Jones, is a massive barrel-domed
and buttressed building for the road-weary traveller.
an aggregate such as sand to make a
light, fibrous, cementitious block. While
it doesn’t have the strength of concrete
(average compressive strength is around
260 psi, whereas concrete can have a
compressive strength in the tens of thou-
sands psi), it has a lot of advantages over
its much harder cousin: it is insular, it’s
inexpensive and it cleans up the environ-
ment.
I like an independent support struc-
ture for a papercrete house because of its
low compressive strength, and I find a
steel roof supported by oilfield pipe does
very well. It adds another recycled
element to the structure and eliminates
the worry of slow compressive failure
over time in the walls, minimizing
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