The Palace Made of Earth

Gatchina is a town not far from Saint Petersburg, and on the shore of its Black Lake stands a dark tower. It looks like it belongs to another age. But the strange part is the palace behind it. It is built of earth. Not as a figure of speech. The walls were made from clay, the same clay you'd be standing on.

Late in the seventeen-hundreds, an architect named Nikolay Lvov asked a simple question. Why must a house cost a fortune? Lvov was the kind of mind people later called the Russian Leonardo. His answer was to dig the material right where you build.

You press the soil in layers, inside a wooden form. A layer of loam ten centimeters thick gets rammed down to about six. Then you wash it with lime mortar. That's the whole method.

The chance to prove it came soon. Emperor Paul the First had taken the Order of Malta under his protection. He wanted a residence for its prior, and he chose Gatchina, a place he loved. The walls went up in a single summer, the summer of seventeen ninety-eight.

Now, you might think that something cheap and fast would be flimsy. It wasn't. The rammed-earth walls were made narrower toward the top, for stability. A retaining wall of stone held the ground behind them. And the whole building cost many times less than one of stone.

The look was deliberate, too. Gloomy, like a Catholic monastery. Narrow windows. A tower where a bell tower would be, rising straight out of the water of the Black Lake.

Then came the twentieth century. War passed through Gatchina. The palace lost its roof, and its fence was smashed. But the walls of pressed clay stood, while stone buildings around them fell.

Afterwards, the rooms held a military unit, and then a Pioneers' House, a kind of after-school club for children. Since nineteen sixty-eight, it has been a museum.

A house of earth that nobody expected to last fifty years is now in its third century. So if you ever ask what's cheapest and strongest to build with, the answer may not be imported stone. It may be under your feet.

What should we tell you about? Your own street would do. moygid dot online.