Arcora continues its work on raw earth construction processes: getting to grips with earth material during a manipulation session supervised by the Atelier matière à construire (Amàco: https://amaco.org/) and visiting the Cycle Terre raw earth material factory, located in Sevran (93).
Carazas Test The Carazas Test, through material manipulation, invites us to understand the three-phase nature of earth material and recognize its qualitative and quantitative variations using all our senses: sight, smell, touch; in addition to performing simple measurements and calculations. It thus allows us to handle earth material of different origins and hydric states (dry, humid, plastic, viscous, and liquid) and to understand its physical and mechanical behaviors. In the Cycle Terre premises and under the tutelage of Amàco, Arcora’s teams manipulated two earths of different origins using the Carazas test.
Findings Earth can be likened to a clay concrete, a natural concrete, where the binder would be clay. Indeed, just like cement concrete, earth possesses a granulometric skeleton, composed of stones, gravel, sand, and silt, associated with a binder (clay for earth, cement for cement concrete). Each of the states composing the double-entry table represented by the Carazas test corresponds to a construction technique.
Visit to the Cycle Terre Factory The teams continued with a visit to the Cycle Terre factory. The result of a long journey stemming from a competition launched by the European Union, the factory aims to give a second life to excavated earth from Paris region construction sites, particularly those of the Grand Paris Express. Open since September 2021, the factory essentially produces CEB (Compressed Earth Blocks), but also mortars and plasters, and extruded earth panels which are still in the development stage.
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