April 09, 2008 JACKSON, Wyo., April 8, 2008 /PRNewswire/ --
Building green may be all the rage, but for Tom Ward you might
say the challenge is building brown -- and literally, from the
ground up. The architect-inventor holds the patent to EarthWall,
a seismically-stable rammed earth construction process for
sustainable building. The main component of EarthWall? It's
clean, natural and available in abundance: plain old dirt.
Watching the six o'clock news one evening in 1999, Ward
recognized an opportunity to save lives. During coverage of the
aftermath of an earthquake in Turkey, the Wyoming architect
noticed that some of the homes -- those built from the region's
indigenous rammed earth technique -- sustained less damage than
the structures built with more modern methods. Ward wondered how
the ages-old technique might be made more stable -- eventually
developing an innovative method of stabilizing the earthen walls
with reinforced steel rods in a "rational structural post
tensioning system" -- that effective