BUILDING IN PISA DE. TentliF.

-111M _Lie ELDERS. of the Spectator may remember how, some two years ages, its pages contented, in connexion with the cheap cottage movement,. a good deal. of °erre.. spondence about the pise de terre form of menstractiors —in., walls of rammed earth.. Since, teen I have been experimenting with this, system, of building, basing mw experiments on the very clear and simple instructions detailedi in The Farmer's Hamlboale, a publication issued by the disee- tion of the Minister' of Agriculture for the Australian Government. I now desire' to report the results of my' experiments to the readers of the Spectator. Since, however, 1 do not wish them to think that I have been fidaing.with ai building hobby while Rome was binning, I may remaik that I adopted. this form of' construction for two small buildings connected with the auxiliary hospital at the address given below. The first building I put up itt pine de terre was a storehouse' for apples and other fruit, rendered necessary by the doubling of the number of inmates in my house, and also incidentally by the fact that patients are large consumers of apples and pears In the course of building this horse I discovered two things: The first was that„ as we do not possess the crystal air and intense sun-heat of Australia, the earth walls do not harden. in England. as described in the, Australian book. That heat evidently produces a. skin which must, be almost like brick.. Alt the same time,, even, in our English, climate the eighteen-bach wall becomes perfectly strong and substantial for ail. practiealt purposes.. Ass however„ it had to face the rains of an. English autumn and winter, I have had. the, outside covered with, a, mixture of coalear and. pitch, which produces a surface very much like that of a tarred road, on end, and appears to, he—or I think I might say is—quite. satisfactory. On. the inside of the building the face of the earth wall is left untouched, and line already become very dry and hard It is evident that it wiTh make a peenliartr good wall for a house. No beet will penetrate through eighteen inches of rammed earth. In this experimental wall I did not sift the earth, but included quite a considerable number of' small atones. Thisy however./ think was a mistake, as it tended to make the face of the wall rather pitted in places.. This did, not weaken the wall materially, but it required a rather extravagant use of the tar and' pitch. I may mention here—though this has nothing tea do with pis de terra building—that the roof is wood( tarred, and that in order to keep out the frost I pot. as fillet on the eaves of the roof, mad covered the root with gem-inned on p. 651.)

(Continued from p. 852.) blocks of compressed peat, of the kind now so much used' for fuel. The result has been very satisfactory. This compressed peat harbours no vermin, is light, and will evidently keep out the frost. It holds, no doubt, a good deal of wet, but then, on the other band, it dries quickly in a wind. If and when it becomes disintegrated by the weather, nothing is easier than to replace the blocks of peat. The pitch of the roof is, of course, a low one. The appearance of the brown peat roof is distinctly pleasant to the eye.

No sooner was the fruit-house finished than I was called upon, just at harvest time, when it was very difficult to procure labour, to build a new dining-room for the hospital which required two walls, two being already in existence at an angle of the main building of the house. At the moment it was impossible to get brieklnyers, and I therefore deter- mined to use the shuttering which had been employed to make the earth walls of the fruit-houses for I was able to command a certain amount of unskilled labour from my own household and from some National Reservists doing "vulnerable point guard" duties in my neighbourhood. It occurred to me that as I lived on the chalk soil I might be venturesome and make a pise de craie (chalk) instead of a pise de terra wall. The result was excellent. If chalk is employed instead of earth, one has to use iron rummers instead of wooden ones. It happened. to be very dry when I quarried my chalk, and therefore I watered each course as it went up. This waa the only difference in construction, save that, when the chalk was put into the box or shuttering, before pounding it with the pounders we chopped it fairly fine with spades. Lumps of chalk about the size of one'a fist break up quite easily when chopped as a cook chops inineement.. The wall is about ten feet high and eighteen inches thick, and has a damp- course. When finished it was pronounced by architects and builders to be strong enough to support a girder. One of the advantages of a pise wall le that no founda- tions are required. All you have to do is to level the earth fairly exactly where you put up your first lot of shuttering. The pounding of the first end succeeding layers consolidates the earth below you as you go, and gives you a safe bed to rest on. Though quarried chalk was used so much in the Middle Ages as a building stone for churches and houses, there are no examples, as far as I know, of pis6 walls in chalk. Pessimists, however, tell me that my wall will soon be disintegrated. First, they say, the winter storms will beat against it, and when it has become saturated with wet— for chalk has a fatal way of absorbing water—a sharp frost will come, and there will be something like an explosion on the surface, which will cause great pieces of the chalk to disintegrate and peel off. To guard against this I bare given

the walls three coats of a patent anti-damp mixture, and hope and believe that I have waterproofed them. But even if the inherent wickedness of the chalk should be proof against this,

I do not feel really alarmed. I feel, so to, speak. that I have the tar and pitch mixture• up my sleeve (abaft omen I), and that if the gloomy prognostications of my expert friend's come

true, I can always do for. the chalk what I have done for the earth.

In case any of my readers may like to experiment with) pise de terre, or, if they live on the chalk, with pisO de (male, the attached memorandum will instruct them, how to. make the shuttering and how to use it. The genesis of this memorandum is as follows. I had the good fortune to be able to show my walls during construction to a distinguished General Officer of Engineers. The soldier of the comic paper or the self-satisfied Parliamentary critic would clearly have refused to look at my experiment, and would hese told me more or less politely that there could not be anything in ib that was not already known to His Majesty's Corps of

Sappers and Miners. As a. matter of fact, the General Officer in question expressed great interest in the work, and instead of scoffing, drew up the memorandum "attached hereto and had it circulated among; our troops on the Western and Eastern fronts.

Before I leave the subject I ought to say that, in my opinion, the earth wall will for most purposes, be found to giee better value than the chalk. The' chalk wall takes longer' to build, and unless, as happened' with me, theresis chalk close to the surface, would be very much more•expensive. What makes the earth wall so useful is, as in the case of ray fruit-house, that you have only to dig a trench some five or six feet from the building that is to be, and then the walls rise like an exhalation from the'earth', and rise with extraordinary rapidity.

I do not see why a regiment in reserve, using relays of men, might not easily build the walls of hubments able to contain the whole unit in four or five days. The woodwork for the windows and doors would of course take longer. The roofing for quick hutment work of this kind should be of corrugated iron, and on the iron should be placed the turfs or sods, cut when the site was laid out for building. Peat would be ideal, but ordinary turf turned upside down is quite sufficiently fibrous to provide a warm temporary covering for the corru- gated iron. If it should, like so many Swiss chalets, produce a hay crop in the summer (one often sees a goat feeding on the top of a Swiss or Tyrolean house), all the better, though it would probably have to be mown before it could be used as fodder for the Colonel's charger 1 3. Sr. Lou Sre,AoRlint, Auxiliary. Hospital, Newlands Corner, Merrow, Guildford,

" WALLS OF PIS] WORK.

Instructions, Comfortable huts can be rapidly erected by unskilled labour if the walls are built of pis& They would be warmer in winter and cooler in summer than wood-framed huts covered with boarding or corrugated iron.

A suitable material would be almost any earth containing a fair amount of loam. Soil which cakes after a heavy rain, or which, ploughed or dug when dry, turns up in hard clods, is also suitable.

Material which is too sandy, or which contains clay, should be avoided.

Vegetation and roots should be removed. The earth is beet used as it is dug, and, if too dry,, should be brought to the correct moist condition by watering it about two days before it is to be used. It should be just moist enough to ho crumbly and yet adhesive enough to retain the impression of tho fingers when, pressed in the hand.

If too moist it will stick to the rammer and work up squashy ; if too dry it will= work up loose. The earth should be spread in 4in. or 5 in. layers between movable timber casings, and each layer very well rammed with heaver wood or iron rammer/3. The top of any layer which has become dry should be very slightly moistened before the next layer is commenced. A. suitable thickness for the walls is 18 in. The wood casings might be in 10 ft. by 2 ft. 6 in. sections formed of it in or la in. deal, having lodges cm the back. Iron clips or small bolts could be provided for attaching one section to another, also distance pieces, and bolts running through the walls to prevent the casings spreading. The casings to be raised as the work proceeds. It is very necessary that the walls should be protected from rain whilst they aro being built. The following points also require attention (1) Some form of damp-course must be provided. A. suitable roofing felt would answer. (2) The finished surface should be treated with two or three coats of whitewash, or (better) tar. (3) External angles might be protected by suitable deal fillets.

(4) Door and window frames should bo built in as the work proceed& They could be secured to the walls by means of strong hoop-iron holdfasts about 15 in. or 18 in. long, having one end nailed to the frame and the other turned up and built in. Four holdfasts to each frame should suffice. The frames could be out of 5 in. by 8 in. fir or other convenient scantling. (5) The roofs should have eaves projecting about 2 ft. 6 in. so as to protect the walls from rain; they should have wide wall plates secured' to the walls with bolts or ties, wood rafters and collar ties, covered with corrugated iron, or boarding and some form of approved roofing felt,"