The World Adobe Forum is an exciting new medium for the sharing of information related to adobe research and application, focusing on understanding and reducing seismic vulnerability. The main objective of the forum is to provide a medium for the sharing of information related to improved-adobe research and application.
Rammed Earth For Sale
Rammed Earth Border
The New York Times challenged thirteen architects, landscape architects, and planners to consider the border zone between Mexico and the United States. The proposal by Albuquerque architect Antoine Predock suggests a rammed earth wall built by Mexican day laborers, rising from the ground.
Marcelo Cortes: Earth Architect
Chilean architect Marcelo Cortes employs an interesting hybrid between industrial and non-industrial technologies. Cortes has developed a “quincha metalica”, a form of traditional quincha construction (mud and straw packed between a bamboo or wood frame) that uses a steel frame work.
Gernot Minke
Prof. Dr. Gernot Minke is a professor at Universitat Kassel, where he leads the Forschungslabor fur Experimentelles Bauen. He has long concerned himself with developments in earth building, and he has dealt with the building material clay in theory and practice since 1977. Visit his website.
TerraBrasil 2006
El I SEMIN¡RIO – Arquitetura e Construção com Terra no Brasil e IV SEMIN¡RIO – Arquitectura de Terra em Portugal (The 1st Brasilian Confrence of Architecture and Construction in Earth and the 4th Conference of Earth Architecture in Portugal) will be held the 4th – 8th of November, 2006 in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Download conference information here (pdf).
Hassan Fathy Web Site
The Hassan Fathy Web Site has a new URL:
Architecture: Dirty Filthy Things
“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.”
Primary School, Gando, Burkina Faso
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 Clay House of the Future
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.