The Architecture
GBB I
GBB I
1975-85
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This first structure had two incarnations: the first, a temporary shelter of impermanent materials, was erected in 1975. This was, in essence, a full-scale model for the second incarnation, which utilized the structural elements of this temporary structure and re-clad them in ferrocement, resulting in a permanent building.
The initial structure was a polyhedral shelter made of prefabricated panels. The plan was to erect it for the summer, and disassemble it for storage over the winter. We rented an empty storefront in Athens in which to work and constructed sandwich panels, which consisted of a wood frame, styrofoam insulation, and painted masonite skin. Doors and windows of particle board were incorporated in the panels. This structure was viewed as a rigid tent.
At the end of that first summer, we revised our plans about taking the structure down and storing it, as it appeared to be strong enough to withstand winter storms. We caulked all the seams, padlocked the doors, and left our vacation shelter until the next year.
Over the next several years, rain and wind did eventually take their toll on the outer masonite skin, but otherwise, the structure remained solid. Deterioration was accelerated because the caulking continually disappeared from the seams of the panels. We finally discovered that bees were responsible: one day, we happened to notice them busily digging at a caulked seam and carting bits away.
In the five years that the masonite-clad structure was in place, we had time to consider alternative, more permanent materials. We kept coming back, however, to ferrocement, a material that first entered our thinking through the preliminary concepts of a geodesic dome and vault-roofed rooms.
In the summer of 1980, Kathy and Christos, guided by book knowledge alone, and with no experience in handling concrete whatsoever, covered the frame of GBB I with ferrocement.
The process took two months of continuous work, during which we mixed and applied 17 50-kg bags of cement (850 kg) and twice that amount of sand. We went by the book, since that's all we had to go by: sand came from a neighboring beach; we sifted it and washed it with fresh water from the spring by the sea (described under water supply) in a shallow makeshift basin lined with a tarp. We then spread it out to dry to insure that the water content would not exceed the amount prescribed by the recipe: 0.6 parts of water to 1 part of cement (0.45 parts, by volume, is the minimum required for hydration). This resulted in a crumbly mixture that was difficult to apply and did not achieve cohesion until it was pressed and trowelled into the chicken wire reinforcement. ("Trowelled" is actually a euphemism, since all handling of the mixture was done with rubber-gloved hands.)
Early in 1983, our son — and only child — Argyrios was born. That summer, before we brought the baby out to the land, where scorpions could be lurking in cracks and crannies, we hired a local mastoras, a multi-talented builder, to plaster the interior of GBB I, which had been left with the studs and styrofoam insulation exposed, since it was beyond our abilities to plaster the underside of horizontal surfaces such as the ceiling.
GBB I served our needs adequately for 10 years, from 1975 to 1980 as a temporary structure, and from 1980 to 1985 as a permanent one. We cooked and dined in it, slept there when we were alone on the site (when friends came, we all slept in tents), and stored our tools and fishing gear there when we left at summer's end. The ravine still served as our toilet.
As our family had expanded and we were also entertaining more and more visitors, we decided to embark on the building of a second structure in 1985.
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