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The Hassan Fathy Web Site has a new URL:

http://www.geocities.com/arc.hassanfathy/

Simone Swan: Adobe Building is the first book to discuss and illustrate Swan’s architecture while also chronicling one of her annual workshops in author Dollens’ first-hand account. Swan studied with the great Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy in his Cairo studio and after his death in 1989 adopted his mission of helping house the world’s poor through the creation of environmental projects that re-examine and promote traditional adobe building while introducing compatible forms, such as the Nubian vault and dome through her organization, The Adobe Alliance.

University of Arizona grads Jason Gallo and Andy Powell build a 750-square-foot guesthouse out of rammed earth in the back yard of Powell’s parents’ home in the Sam Hughes area. more…

“Dirt is also an intrinsically architectural material. Both architecture and grime are by-products of the grinding wheels of civilisation. Architecture’s unnatural and artificial environments help define what dirt is.”

read more from contemporary-magazine.com

Diébédo Francis Kéré, an architecture student in Berlin, took upon himself the cause of ensuring that his village would not be deprived of a school, and with a group of friends in Germany, Kéré set up a fund-raising association, Schulbausteine fur Gando (Bricks for the Gando School). The idea met with a positive response and, having secured finance through the association, Kéré also obtained the support of LOCOMAT (a government agency in Burkina Faso) to train brickmakers in the technique of working with compressed stabilized earth. The project is a recipient of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Ninth Award Cycle, 2002 – 2004.

YBE2004 Houses of the Future is the showcase event for the Year of the Built Environment which challenged Australians to consider the future of our built environment and the most tangible element of that environment – the house. The Clay House uses the twin concepts of a courtyard plan and the inherent mass of clay brick products to create an intimate and private house. The driving concept behind this design is that it can fit into a small block, and has high level of thermal comfort that doesn’t rely on artificial cooling and heating.

The Center for Irish Earthen Architecture was founded in response to the number of enquiries sent to the Plymouth centre of earthen architecture, regarding information, training and the techniques of cob, rammed earth, adobe and wattle and daub. Along with the development and implementation of training courses for both the individual and academic institutions, the centre wishes to establish a monitoring system to deliver competence in earthen architecture to the wider audience.

In 2002, University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeologists discovered a 3700-year-old “magical” birth brick inside the palatial residence of a Middle Kingdom mayor’s house just outside Abydos, in southern Egypt. The colorfully decorated mud birth brick, the first ever found, is one of a pair that would have been used to support a woman’s feet while squatting during actual childbirth.

The scene: a humble clay house on one of Baghdad’s meanest streets. A knock at the door. When the man of the house answers, he is astonished. “We have presents for you!” warbles Shaima Emad Zubair, a young siren with tangerine lipstick. Batting her blue-mascaraed eyes, she pokes her microphone his way. “Labor and Materials” is Iraq’s answer to “Extreme Home Makeover” and the country’s first reality TV show. In 15-minute episodes, broken windows are made whole again. Blasted walls slowly rise again.

The Residence at Meteor Vineyards in Napa Valley, California contains a guest house constructed of rammed earth that is comprised of a V-shaped roof floating above the massive walls. Read more.