Prof. Antonin Fabbri

Raw earth is coming back in contemporary architecture, with recent buildings in
Lyon such as L'Orangerie and Les Ateliers de la danse. Engineering with it is still
difficult, because the material is not standardized, it is heterogeneous, and its
properties change with its water content. This talk presents current research on four
questions: how to test the material reliably in the lab, how water affects its strength
and stiffness, how to model this hydro-mechanical coupling using the concept of
suction, and how to assess walls on site with non-destructive methods such as
ultrasonic waves. It ends with the non-technical barriers to raw-earth construction
and argues for a performance-based approach that would help bring it into
mainstream building.