A couple of more things. There's a bit more about this in the government's Ozark Native Stone buildings surveys that interviewed homeowners and builders. The other pdf links documents a bit of this, and there's some more info floating around the net on "Ozark rock masonry" and especially using slipforms before the 1940s..
I'm reading up more on all of this to sort of glean more tidbits of information and techniques. Either practical stuff or inspirational stuff, seeing how people solved basic problems creatively. It might help inspire me into a more creative way of thinking.
Something that's really occurring to me as I - basically - geek out reading up on this stuff is that there are many, many, ways of solving basic building problems in a low tech and low impact but effective way. Albeit with a lot of elbow grease...
Something that really fascinated me about Permacuture in general was that if we look through history across the world we can see that people did many things, in different places, that worked well for where they were and what their situation was (though not always) and that today we can be inspired by a technique someone did, or a more holistic look at their whole context, and be inspired by it in finding low-impact and sustainable ways to do things with our existing technology and body of knowledge today. Just because someone did something in their
indigenous situation 500 years ago and it worked for them doesn't mean that there's not a more effective way of solving a similar problem now.. but their creative processes and experiences can teach us.
So anyway I'm geeking out here, cramming my brain reading about what appears to be a really old way of building. And one that's far more widespread than I thought. For example, It seems that some early 20th century urban stone masonry buildings in Palestine were build in a similar way, concrete backing or core walls partially wood formed, and stone facing. I;m still digging up references to see exactly how some concrete and stone (possibly lime mortar based concrete) wood-formed stone buildings were done in the West Bank, for example. Or, and I'll get into this, flint masonry churches and houses in Northern England..
I've sometimes seen it mentioned that Slipform stone masonry was started by, or picked up because of the architect Ernest Flagg, but I've seen mentions that a lot of people in the Ozarks got turned onto stone building because of the Craftsman movement, and in particular reading Craftsman
magazine. I can't find copies yet but I'm sure there's something out there interesting.
Helen Nearing is supposed to have learned of it from Ernest Flagg's
books. But there was another architect who encouraged a more DIY attitude than Flagg did, and modifying some of Flagg's methods. Frazier Forman Peters.
Frazier Forman Peters build several well known homes, and advocated people use similar techniques in doing either stone faced wood-form backed houses with or full concrete houses.
Frazier Forman Peters wrote a couple of interesting but really hard to get books about DIY house building. One is "Pour yourself a house: low-cost building with concrete and stone". I couldn't find a PDF anywhere and print copies are $75 on Amazon, but it is listed in OpenLibrary.org for electronic checkout.
He also wrote "Houses of stone." (1933) which does have a pdf on archive.org
Digging around though I found some earlier stuff, that made me think Ernest Flagg got his techniques from stuff people were already doing. For example, lookup "gravel-wall" construction.
Basically people were using slipforms to do lime mortar and gravel concrete houses poured in 1 foot lifts. They'd let it set a few days, then move the forms up.
At the same time there were other masons in the 1800s doing cobblestone masonry houses. There's little published about how they did it, but there's some suggestions I ran into that some of them may have used movable wooden forms.
Then I started digging around and found some old farm magazines from around the civil war or before in which people were doing the exact same thing, using planks as slipforms, set in front of poles that they called "standards" and building barns or utility buildings in 1 foot lifts by throwing down lime mortar or concrete, dumping rocks or cobblestones in it, and then raising it etc.
Now, it turns out, the Cobblestone masonry builders were quite possibly influenced by flint cobblestone builders in England. In Norwich, for example, practically the whole old town, everything pre-20th century, is built of little fist size cobblestones. Well, it turns out, some of these buildings going back to the middle ages were built using a sort of "movable timber shuttering" and medieval drawings of workmen show the use of "movable shuttering" - slipforms essentially - very similar to the ones illustrated in that Ozarks booklet or that Ernest Flagg used..
I'll dig up the source, but one book I saw mentioned that medieval flint masonry builders built in 1 foot tall lifts, roughly, throwing down a bed of lime mortar and throwing the stones in, carefully working the edges, but the middle was full of just random ugly stones.
They let it cure, lifted the boards up another foot, repeated etc.
They built entire cathedrals that way.
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BUT I imagine that northern Pakistan and parts surrounding get pretty cold. I'm afraid I don't know how it would stand up to frozen winter conditions.
