This year’s building project at the Kinsale College- the first since I took over as permaculture teacher- is a reciprocal-framed roundhouse roughly the same size and style as my own in Derrydubh.
This will be an on-going project over the next year or two and will provide us ultimately with a multi-fuctional building which could be used as a classroom or workshop, meeting place, and as a changing rooms for the drama students during their performances. Behind the cord-wood amphitheater there had been a port-o-cabin or something similar in the past, so we were able to utilise the existing slab to build onto. We had the help of Saul Mossbacher to construct the frame. Saul pointed out that this is in fact the third reciprocal frame we have built- including my own and a small hut we constructed with students at the Coppeen National School a few years ago. We had a delivery of Douglas Fir poles from the Manch estate and began stripping the bark The uprights were fixed to the base with metal brackets, and the poles fastened together with pegs made from iron re-inforcing bar.
Putting up a reciprocal frame is a great project for a group. The reciprocal nature of the frame mirrors the reciprocal nature of our team-work required to build it!
We have started a stone base to the walls, mortared onto the concrete slab. This will only be about 30cms high, and 45cms wide. In this design, although we felt we needed to keep it round looking from below to keep it in the same style as the amphitheater we decided to gain a little more space inside by making a square corner at the back.
The intention is to build each section between the nine uprights in a different green building technique- cordwood, strawbale, pure cob, wattle-and-daub, maybe even a solid hemp-lime section. I think we can give the concrete-block section a miss!
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What are you planning on roofing it with? I like the idea of using sod, but what do you use to make it waterproof? How about thatch? It’s illegal (well it’s against code) to use thatch or wood shingles in parts of the US , but probably not in Ireland. I’ll be interested to see what yo come up with.
We will board over the frame and then put a plastic membrane and then sod- I did this for my own house. Thatch needs a steeper pitch to throw off the rain faster- otherwise it wont last long. On the other hand, sod is not so good on a steeper pitch as it may not “cling” to the roof.
I’m interested in building something like this, but the construction you used raises a few questions. In the designs i’ve see so far there’s a smaller and higher square construction in the center of the building to support the beams in the center of the roof. But in your building this seems not the case. I can imagine that there was an temporary support while placing the first poles, but does this roof support itself once it is finished? Can you make a picture of the center straight up? Great work!
There is a picture of my own house in Derrydubh looking up through the skylight on my “About” page, and a full description of how it was built. A temporary post is used to support the rafters until the last one completes the “reciprocal” (self-supporting) frame and the post is removed- magic!
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[...] Zone5 has a brief description with some images of a Tony Wrench-style reciprocal roof construction for a roundhouse here and here [...]
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