In the main article “Natural stone offcuts can be used to build walls just like bricks“ we described the Albamiel House. https://www.stone-ideas.com/98171/walls-built-with-natural-stone-bricks/ Here are a few technical details about this innovative way of using natural stone:
One of the peculiarities is that the starting material was originally offcuts from the natural stone production site, i.e.: Albamiel sandstone, extracted by the Rosal Stones company not far from the southern Spanish city of Murcia.
Catalina Sánchez, the company’s managing director, has calculated the cost of cutting the pieces and says: “Our bricks made of natural stone are 30% cheaper than industrially produced masonry blocks.“ Although there is a lot of manual labor involved, the material as such costs practically nothing, since it is waste from other production processes.
In the Albamiel house, the partition walls inside are made of such stones. They are 8 cm thick and weigh a maximum of 18 kg each, so they can be moved without a crane.
They are held together by a mortar made of pure natural lime. It carries an eco-certification, just like the plasters.
Pepa Díaz has implemented three different ways of using natural stone in this project.
In addition to the aforementioned walls with solid stone, she has also developed special insulating walls together with Rosal Stones. These are placed in front of the load-bearing concrete walls on the outside.
They consist – from the outside to the inside – of a solid stone wall of 12 cm thickness, an intermediate space of 6 cm of insulating material and 4 cm of air, and finally a masonry of 8 cm again. Calculations for 10 cm thick stone with rock wool have shown a thermal transmittance of 0.29 W/m² K.
The masonry also achieves excellent values for acoustic insulation. Catalina Sánchez estimates them at the 60db just like the stone as such brings.
Pepa Díaz interprets these values with a grin: “We built a bunker.”
In the third type of use, the natural stone is used for wall cladding as a tile 2 cm thick, the surfaces of which juts out and recedes.
The panels on the doors of the office wall cabinets are a mere 1.2 cm thick.
The pine wood was treated with water-based paints that are free of VOC emissions or other pollutants.
Download: technical values of Albamiel sandstone
Pepa Díaz Arquitecta (Spanish)
Download technical values: Albamiel Natural Stone Bricks
