LOAD BEARING HEMPCRETE? A PRELIMINARY RESEARCH

Hempcrete is generally used in construction as an infill material for loadbearing frames. Contrary to this tendency, a vaulted prototype of load bearing cast-in hempcrete has been built during a training workshop at Cardiff University in 2009 under the project of architect David Lea. A team of researchers at Politecnico di Torino is working on further developing this experiment aiming the construction of a full-scale loadbearing hempcrete pavilion. The paper reports the first research results, including design and sample testing of hempcrete mixtures, computational simulations and detailed design of the prototype. Despite the radicalness of the solution, our investigation seems to show that the use of hempcrete for structure, envelope and insulation at once has a certain potential, at least for small projects.