The wall in the lobby for the Stadium TechCenter was going to be twenty feet tall and twenty-two feet long. We’d have to make four individual long panels, each panel five feet high and over twenty-two feet long. At 136 pounds per cubic foot, weight was going to be an issue. How were we going to get these long, thin panels onto a truck, drive them sixty miles, get them off the truck, and then squeeze through a front door barely wider than the panels were long? (Don’t make the mistake of thinking we could turn them sideways to get through the door because we couldn’t). Once inside the lobby we had to stack them one on top of another up to the full twenty feet, and look out! The already-installed fire sprinkler pipes were only twenty-one feet off the floor.

OK, back at the shop. We designed a steel frame made from five inch angle iron and flat bar with intermediate rebar. The idea was that we would have a rammed earth wall built within a hidden steel frame - stiff enough to transport without breaking and strong enough to mount onto the wall at the Stadium TechCenter. We welded temporary hooks onto the frame so we could lift the panels up once they were fully cured. We made one frame for each panel, and used our standard rammed earth forms to encase the frames while ramming. The forms were reusable.

Relatively straightforward so far. We had a lot of color work and small sample walls to study before we satisfied the architects on what the wall was going to look like, but once we had our formulas - there were six different mix designs - the real work of mixing and compacting could begin. It is much more complicated to create a wall of multiple colors and variable lift depth than a monochromatic wall of uniform lifts. Each mix pile was labeled and the equipment operators had written instructions on when to change colors. Khyber had his list of lift heights and where to introduce the infusion lines. And remember, each of the four panels was a different combination of color and strata to create the overall composition of the mural. This was definitely not a blow and go type of install. It’s more like painting a watercolor landscape while wearing a blindfold.