Architecture, Design, and Culture using of mud, clay, soil, dirt & dust.
Australian rap star Iggy Azalea grew up in a house that her father built by hand from mud bricks, surrounded by 5 hectares of land. She reminisces about it in her song Work:
You can hate it or love it
Hustle and the struggle is the only thing I’m trusting
Thorough bread in a mud brick before the budget
White chick on that Pac shit
My passion was ironic
And my dreams were uncommon
Butabu is the online portfolio of the earthen architecture of Sub-Saharan Africa as photographed by James Morris and published in a book by Princeton Architectural Press 2003 and Electa 2004.
Rai Studio and Architecture for Humanity Tehran, in collaboration with the Norwegian Refugee Council, have recently completed an adobe construction prototype intended for Afghan refugees living in Kerman, close to the centre of Iran.
Built in an Afghan Refugee Camp in Kerman, Iran, the 100 meter square meter domed shelter is comprised of approximately 6,000 mud bricks.
Pouya Khazaeli, principal of Rai Studio and architecture professor at Azad University, Tehran and Ghazvin, notes: “Social sustainability in design is our main focus area here. It means to study how these refugees live, communicate, the meaning of privacy in their live, which materials they prefer and use for construction, which kind of construction techniques they use themselves, how much they spend normally to construct their own shelters….”
Read more at Domus
Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna from Oliver Wilkins on Vimeo.
The village of New Gourna was designed and built in the 1940s by the Egyptian Architect Hassan Fathy. He pioneered the use of sustainable materials and environmentally friendly design to build housing for low income families who were being relocated from their original village at Old Gourna.
60 years later, many of the now historic New Gourna buildings have fallen into disrepair and others have disappeared or been changed beyond recognition. A project is underway to safeguard the site, and World Monuments Fund (WMF) commissioned us to produce a film presenting the perspective of the residents…
For more information about WMF’s work at New Gourna, see wmf.org/project/new-gourna-village
“In El Rancho Grande,” by Woody Guthrie (1936; Santa Fe, N.M.), oil on board.
The legendary Woody Guthrie, an American folk singer, was also a brilliant and distinctive prose stylist, whose writing is distinguished by a homespun authenticity, deep-seated purpose and remarkable ear for dialect. These attributes are on vivid display in Guthrie’s long-lost “House of Earth,” his only fully realized, but yet unpublished, novel written as a direct response to the Dust Bowl. In December 1936 the rambling troubadour had an epiphany while busking for tips in New Mexico. He’d traveled there after a treacherous duster whacked the Texas Panhandle town of Pampa, where he’d been living in poverty. While in New Mexico, Guthrie became transfixed by an adobe hacienda’s sturdy rain spouts and soil-straw bricks, a simple yet solid weatherproof structure unlike most of his Texan friends’ homes, which were poorly constructed with flimsy wooden boards and cheap nails.
An immediate convert, Guthrie purchased a nickel pamphlet, “Adobe or Sun-Dried Brick for Farm Buildings,” from the United States Department of Agriculture. The manual instructed poor rural folk on building adobe homes from the cellar up. All an amateur needed was a home-brew of clay loam, straw and water. Guthrie promoted this U.S.D.A. guide with wild-eyed zeal. Adobes, he boasted, would endure the Dust Bowl better than wooden aboveground structures that were vulnerable to wind, snow, dust and termites. If sharecroppers and tenant farmers could only own a piece of land — even the uncultivable territory of arroyos and red rocks — they could build a “house of earth” that would protect them from dirt blowing in through cracks in the walls.
Read more in an article Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp in the New York Times
La arquitectura de Gurunsi (kassena) causó una gran impresión en el arquitecto suizo, Le Corbusier. Esta arquitectura, conocida como casas sukhala, forman poblados fortificados en Tiébélé, Burkina Faso. Se trata de construcciones de adobe que se revisten de barro y posteriormente son adornadas con motivos abstractos, que las mujeres de la tribu pintan sobre fachadas y muros.
Las mujeres de la tribu son las encargadas de reparar las fachadas de las casas, revistiéndolas periódicamente con barro, y decorándolas de nuevo. En primer lugar dan una capa de barro mezclada con excremento de vaca, que extienden con las manos con la ayuda de agua para que éste resbale. Cuando el barro está fresco, dibujan sobre él algunas líneas que marcarán los patrones. Mientras el barro va secando preparan los pigmentos para pintar con arena roja, excremento de vaca más oscuro o polvo de roca. Dejan secar la base inicial, y la repasan con canto rodado, para que la superficie quede completamente pulida. Cuando ha secado por completo, comienzan a pintar con los pigmentos ya preparados, sus motivos geométricos, utilizando las manos o pinceles de plumas de gallina. Finalmente, una vez seco, pulen la superficie con ramas, proceso que se repite hasta tres veces, para garantizar la calidad de ese acabado.
[ More at TecnonicaBlog.com Sukhala I and TecnonicaBlog.com Sukhala II ]
Inspired by the work of Mexican architect Juan Jose Santibañez, who helped twenty women in difficult living conditions to build their own homes in Oaxaca twenty years ago, Portuguese architecture firm Blaanc Borderless and Mexican studio CaeiroCapurso have recently launched Adobe for Women.
The Daw’an Mud Brick Architecture Foundation is a private independent organization, financially autonomous and accountable, registered at the Office of Ministry of Industry and Commerce, Hadramut Branch with goal to:
Design of new projects including public and private buildings and extensions, based on sensitive, challenging architectural concepts and use of building materials
Assist with organic and industrial waste management
For more information visit The Daw’an Mud Brick Architecture Foundation website.
The Hilltop House, a large rammed earth structure built at the address of 1300 Rhode Island Avenue, NE, in Washington, DC in 1773. Before its demolition in 1956, which made way for subsidized housing, it was the oldest extant house in the Washington DC area. The house served as the interim White House for President James Monroe after the British burned the official residence.
An attempt was apparently made to bring raze the building with a wrecking ball after World War I failed after the ball proved ineffective, prompting the owners let the house stand. It was then renovated and it served as an embassy for some time.
The photo is from A quantitative comparison of rammed earth and sun-cured adobe buildings by Richard Hudson Clough and published by The University of New Mexico Press as a Masters Thesis in 1950. Clough went on to become the Dean of Engineering at UNM and wrote the definitive texts on construction contracting.
[ Research Credit: Quentin Wilson ]