MOLOAA — This house is made of bricks that float. It’s billed as fireproof, rot-proof, bug-proof, fungus-proof, better on the environment, easier on the pocketbook and provides new potential revenue in the construction industry.
But above all, it’s a do-it-yourself house that can be put together for as little as $5,000.
“The biggest thing is that it’s kind of like an earth barnacle,” said Rob Cruz, Kauai farmer who helped build the dome-shaped AirCrete house in Moloaa with Hajjar Gibran and his organization, “Domegaia.” “Water, bugs, fungus…nothing’s going to move it.”
Building the 20-foot diameter dome took about a month of prep work and then an intensive 10 days with 35 people helping to set bricks made from a mixture of cement, water and foam called AirCrete.
“They are created by injecting high pressure air into concrete,” Cruz said. “It makes the blocks light. You can hold them with one hand and cut them with a hand saw.”
The Moloaa dome looks something akin to a giant igloo, and the cost is around $10,000, and the AirCrete blocks act as insulation because the concrete contains a large amount of air.
That cost depends upon how each dome home is constructed. For example, Domegaia says a 1,000-square-foot home with walls four inches thick costs about $4,000.
Gibran, who pioneered the concept of do-it-yourself AirCrete, said he developed the building method in Thailand when he was building The Gibran Center in Kim San Suke.
“I’ve been building all my life and dreaming of developing an innovative way of creating high quality, low-cost building solutions to answer the need of housing in the world,” Gibran said.
He studied engineering at San Diego State University and one of his first projects was a passive solar home in Nova Scotia he built when he was in his 20s.
In the 1980s Gibran founded Life Designs, a company that preserved 25,000 acres of rainforest working with the Rainforest Action Network.
Next was the creation of The Gibran Center which was a place of healing nestled in rural Thailand that focused on and extrapolated the teachings of Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese American author who wrote The Prophet, as well as other works in the early 1900s.
Kahlil Gibran’s great nephew, Hajjar, continued his family’s spiritual writing tradition with “Return of the Prophet,” published in 2008.
The influence of his great-uncle has woven its way through Gibran’s entire life, alongside his writings, and has inspired Gibran toward the man he is today.
“He’s had a huge influence on me and so many of the people that grew up in the 60s,” Gibran said. “He sort of shaped my spiritual life.”
Through The Gibran Center’s creation, Hajjar discovered AirCrete and dome building.
“It wasn’t available to the do-it-yourself builder, just industrial and it was too expensive. I had to invent my own way of producing it,” Gibran said. “It was simple and doable.”
In 2015, Gibran moved away from The Gibran Center and reformed the concept into Domegaia, with an expansion on the existing spiritual, healing and empowerment focus into dome home building.
At that time, a friend asked Gibran to build an AirCrete dome home on Hawaii Island’s Hamakua Coast.
“He was doing a sustainability project there and wanted me to help him,” Gibran said. “It was right at the time when things were happening at The Gibran Center and I felt it was time to change.”
Now, Domegaia has half an acre in Kalapana and staff is working on a proposal to acquire 17 more acres in order to build a model of what AirCrete dome homes can do for Hawaii.
“There’s such a need for it everywhere, but especially on the islands,” Gibran said. “We made such a great connection with the people of Kauai that we’d like to do a bigger project there. It’s just a matter of time.”
•••
Jessica Else, environmental reporter, can be reached at 245-0452 or jelse@thegardenisland.com.
