Sustainable building with local material: a case study

Abstract

Nowadays, using local materials in construction such as in-situ soils is attractive because on one hand, these materials have low embodied energy and on the other hand, houses constructed with soil material present an interesting living comfort thanks to their interesting hygro-thermal behavior. This is why several researches have been recently carried out to study soil materials. However, one difficulty of the constructions using local materials is that they must satisfy several exigencies of the modern regulations which are established for conventional materials (e.g. concrete): mechanical, thermal performances, durability and earthquake resistance. This paper presents a project (three buildings) using local materials (in-situ soil and wood) in Nice city (France). Firstly, specifications of the project are presented: architecture, material characteristics (by laboratory tests). Secondly, a LCA study is presented which compares a villa of this site and another virtual villa constructed by a conventional method. The results illustrate the sustainability of this project. Finally, the earthquake performance is studied which consists of two approaches: a numerical modelling and the in-situ dynamic measurements which enable to validate the numerical model. The results show that these constructions can satisfy seismic demands following Eurocode 8.