Archinect - News

A wave of new hemp designs appear on the horizon in Australia

2024-11-26T15:37:00-05:00

While big architectural gestures commonly feature glass and steel, those building with the material hope to show that hemp can be grand in its own right.

The Guardian points out Public Realm Lab’s Powerhouse Place, the recently named winner of the National Award for Sustainable Architecture at the 2024 National Architecture Awards, as an example of Australia’s embrace of hempcrete and other hemp products as alternative building materials. Hemp is gaining in popularity in the United States after being effectively outlawed until a 2018 federal reclassification paved the way for it to be added to the U.S. building code appendix in 2022.

Back down under, Public Realm Lab’s co-founder Anna Maskiell tells the outlet: "We were really sick of designing buildings that were just less bad, tinkering around the edges with solar panels and that kind of thing. We were really on this mission to try to find a material that was truly regenerative. It’s a very different way of working, but we think there’s a lot of efficiencies in it."

BIG designs off-grid 'adventure village' Vollebak Island

2023-06-01T14:29:00-04:00

BIG has shared details about their latest collaboration with British clothing company Vollebak to design a self-sufficient, off-grid island off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. Named after the brand, the 11-acre Vollebak Island is intended to be fully powered by carbon-neutral energy.

The island site centers around the 6,426-square-foot Earth House, a village-like series of nine interconnected buildings clustered under a man-made hill, and the 947-square-foot Wood House, a standalone garden suite structure on the island’s eastern shoreline.

View of Vollebak Island's Earth House. Rendering: MIR. Image courtesy Vollebak

Each space on the island is made from material tailored for their specific uses, including stacked seaweed, compacted earth, hemp, glass brick, and locally-sourced stone. The island will be powered through a combination of offshore wind, geothermal energy, and solar power, with the energy stored in Tesla power walls.

The Earth House. Rendering: MIR. Image courtesy Vo...

Team of UBC students builds one of Canada's first near-zero embodied carbon campus spaces

2023-04-21T12:33:00-04:00

A team of students from the University of British Columbia (UBC) has built a near-zero embodied carbon building on campus using hempcrete, wood, and steel as primary materials.

Called the Third Space Commons, the project was led by Third Quadrant Design, UBC’s first green building design team. The group is comprised of 60 students from the Faculty of Applied Science and the Sauder School of Business. The building is a wooden structure spanning 2,400 square feet, made from the adaptive reuse of an existing single-family home on the campus. Every aspect of the project, from the materials to the building methods, were chosen to decrease and capture carbon emissions.

The building’s thermal insulation is made of hempcrete, a concrete substitute made of lime and hemp fibers that is effective in carbon sequestration. Its foundation was constructed with reusable steel piles, and, for most of the project, the team used light wood framing instead of engineered wood, which contains fossil fuel-derived adhesives. The team also reused many materials from other construction sites in Vancouver, including the building’s windows, solar panels, appliances, and lumber, whic...

Hempcrete has been added to the U.S. building code appendix

2022-12-05T15:22:00-05:00

For many years, industrial hemp was illegal in the US due to hemp’s association with drug use, despite the fact that it does not contain more than 0.3 percent THC [...] Building residential homes with hempcrete was therefore effectively outlawed until 2018, when the Farm Bill distinguished between hemp and cannabis plants. Then, in September 2022, hemp building materials were added to the model US residential building code, paving the way for legal use in 2024.

The International Residential Code (IRC) accepted a modified appendix in September that some are hopeful could be a catalyst for further adaptation throughout the building industry. Builders for Climate Action spokesman Chris Magwood says its greatest potential lies in commercial construction, though applications within residential design do present inherent challenges owing to drying times, insulation R-Values, and other factors.

Previously on Archinect: Hemp is about to take an outsized role in the building industry's push to go green

"I don't think that hempcrete will ever play a large role in the residential market," Magwood recently explained to Treehugger. "The fact that it is a composite material that uses a lime-based binder means that it is less insulative than other options and more expensive. Somebody has to mix, form, and cure the material, whether that happens on-site or in pre-fab units or blocks. To meet basic minimum code requirements in colder climates requires at l...

Hemp is about to take an outsized role in the building industry's push to go green

2022-07-19T17:40:00-04:00

While most of these buildings are constructed out of more traditional materials like cement, brick, drywall, and plywood, forward-thinking architects and members of the construction industry have increasingly been turning to natural materials as an alternative for the future. Due to its ability to sequester carbon, hemp has landed itself at the forefront of the conversation about natural building.

Hemp’s high tensile strength, pliability, and strength-to-weight ratio are increasingly valuable in the manufacture and design of products like fiberboard and even a new concrete alternative. The recent COP26 conference in Glasgow featured the speculative 'Urban Sequoia' design from SOM that combined hempcrete with other green materials like algae and bio-bricks to create a high-rise tower capable of sequestering 1,000 tons of CO2 per year.

One industry executive says it’s going to change the way we build, and that this is only the beginning in terms of what we’ll see coming onto the marketplace in the next few decades. “We’ve made blueprints for hemp villages,” Jayeson Hendyrsan, CEO of Hempcrete Natural Building Ltd., told the AIA’s Topic A blog. “We want families to live in these carbon neutral homes for generations. While we’re a way off from that being widespread, we...

Texas A&M researchers receive $3.74M for the development of 3D-printed hempcrete buildings

2022-06-21T15:33:00-04:00

A project by researchers at Texas A&M University has received a $3.74 million grant for the development of resilient, 3D-printed building designs using a new green material called hempcrete. Its usage has the potential to lower the environmental impact of traditional construction methods and make housing more affordable and available.

The funding was made available by the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Harnessing Emissions into Structures Taking Inputs from the Atmosphere (HESTIA) program. Leading the project is Petro Sideris, assistant professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who will develop residential and potential commercial construction designs. His team consists of assistant professor Maria Koliou, department head and professor Zachary Grasley, and professor Anand Puppula from the department, and associate professor Manish Dixit and professor Wei Yan from the Texas A&M College of Architecture.

Hem...

Finnish University receives grant to explore industrial applications for hemp

2016-04-20T17:32:00-04:00

Turku University of Applied Sciences has received a grant of 70,417 euros to see if hemp could be used more in construction projects. The research will involve investigating the soundproofing and fireproof properties of the substance. Researchers will also look at how hemp decomposes and to see how it could be used as fertilizer - in order to determine how eco-friendly hemp's waste materials are.

The article is careful to note that hemp has far less THC than marijuana and is therefore not a psychoactive substance (obviously) – but the news still feels topical.

Hemp has been used for centuries for ropes, oils and textiles. But marijuana criminalization efforts in the 20th centuries seriously hurt hemp's brand (among other things). Now that marijuana is beginning to become destigmatized, there's been a renewed interest in hemp and its many potential uses.

"Hemp-based concrete is already marketed with names like Hempcrete and Canosmose, and is made up of a mixture of hemp fibres, lime and other materials," the authors note. "The mixture is not as strong as conventional concrete however and is used in conjunction with extra framing support."

Here's some other 4/20-related articles from the archives:

House of hemp? Pushing cannabis as a construction material

2012-03-26T15:04:00-04:00

Hemp Technologies said it wants to use hemp-based materials to construct a 500-square-foot structure at the ruins of Knapp's Castle near Santa Barbara. The principal material for the project is Hempcrete, made of the woody internal stem of the Cannabis sativa plant, which is processed into chips and mixed with a lime-based binder. That concoction is then sprayed on, poured into slabs or formed into blocks like concrete to create the shell of a building.