Category: RESOURCES

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L’Association Nationale des Professionnels de la TERRE Crue

L’Association Nationale des Professionnels de la TERRE Crue fédère les acteurs et actrices de la construction en terre crue en France. Elle regroupe des artisans et des chefs d’entreprise, des producteurs de matériaux, des architectes, des ingénieurs, et des organismes de formation professionnelle. Elle accueille aussi des représentants d’organismes régionaux (parcs…) ou d’autres associations développant des activités dans le domaine de l’architecture de terre (valorisation des patrimoines nationaux, architecture contemporaine, recherche sur les matériaux et les techniques…).

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Modern Concrete Grew from Traditional Rammed Earth

In the book Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture Peter Collins describes how the origins of modern concrete evolved from technological developments pertaining directly to the traditional use of rammed earth in France. He writes:

“…when concrete did again come into use as a building material, it evolved from an entirely independent, and much more humble origin: pisé [rammed earth]. The peculiarity of pisé construction thus lay not only in the economy of using earth as a building material, but in the process whereby a building was moulded into shape, and it was inevitable that sooner or later some far-sighted individuals should appreciate the revolutionary possibilities of this method of construction, and seek to extend it by improving on the material used. The most obvious improvement was to increase the cohesion of the earth by mixing in a binding material such as mortar, and this had in fact already been done by [Jean-Baptiste] Rondelet when repairing the château in Ain. It was left to others to experiment with suitable hard aggregates, and produce modern concrete, or, as it was termed in French, béton. The first of the pioneers was an ingenious but ambitions building labourer named François Cointeraux.” – Peter Collins, Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 20-21.

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The Future of Mud: A Tale of Houses and Lives in Djenne

The Future of Mud: A Tale of Houses and Lives in Djenne, a new film by Susan Vogel and presented by the Musée National du Mali, is the story of Komusa, master mason and heir to the secrets of Djenne architecture. He hopes his son will continue the family profession and maintain their world heritage city – but Djenne is connected to a global world now, and competing ideas about the future have arrived. Documentary footage and staged scenes tell an intimate story of family tensions, contemporary building practices, and the precarious future of the renowned mud architecture of Mali.

Treehugger writes of the film:

A “collective connection to earthen architecture is best seen in the film’s footage of the annual re-plastering of the town’s pride, the Great Mosque, which is the world’s largest earth building, in addition to being a distinguished UNESCO World Heritage site. The first earthen structure here on this site dates back to the 13th century and is re-plastered every year. The day-long, annual festival is truly a communal affair, with plenty of foreign tourists gawking on and filming the orderly chaos.”


photo of the Great Mosque of Djenne by Ferdinand Reus

The Future of Mud: A Tale of Houses and Lives in Djenne
Co-Produced with Trevor Marchand and Samuel Sidibé.
Edited by Harry Kafka. Music by Issa Bagayogo. In Bamana, French, English with English subtitles. Color, 58 minutes. Distributed by FRIF.com. Available fall 2007.

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Earth Architecture – The Book

Earth Architecture began February 22, 2003 as a way to organize online research on earthen architecture and now, after almost 5 years of blogging on earth architecture, a book on the subject that will be published by Princeton Architectural Press in the Fall of 2008. The book will offer a history of earthen architecture, particularly a modern history of earthen architecture which touches on the efforts of Cointeraux, Gaudí, Schindler, Wright, Le Corbusier, Loos, Fathy, and many more of your favorite architects of the modern era. The book also discusses Rammed Earth, Mud Brick, Compressed Earth Block and many of the several earth building technologies and how they have evolved to meet the demands of contemporary society.

The book will also feature 40 cutting edge projects designed by architects and constructed of earth from the past 35 years, including work by many well known architects such as Rick Joy, Mauricio Rocha, Rural Studio, Glenn Murcutt, Arup Associates, Mathias Klotz, Predock_Frane Architects, Cutler Anderson Architects, Reitermann and Sassenroth, Heikkinen – Komonen Architects and Yung Ho Chang, to name a few, as well as important works by lesser well known architects who have produced critical works of contemporary architecture.

This is a very exciting moment in the history of this blog. It coincides with International Listings ranking Earth Architecture among the top 100 Architecture Blogs. It is an honor to be on the list with some really great blogs. In fact, I have to give props to Geoff for the idea for announcing the impending publication. If you’d like to know more about the book or would like to be reminded when the it is released, please email me, and thanks for reading about the most widely used building material on the planet.

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United Bottle

The Zürich based architecture office INSTANT (Dirk Hebel & Jörg Stollmann with Tobias Klauser) has designed a water bottle that can be recycled and filled with local soil and stacked to form temporary shelter. The concept, called UNITED_BOTTLE can be used by Governments and NGOs to distribute water locally and regionally and be able to upcycle the bottle as a building material in combination with found materials such as sand, earth and natural insulation materials such as animal hair. The simple water bottle would operate as a container for the awareness of the next crisis.

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Historic Adobes of Los Angeles County

The book, Historic Adobes of Los Angeles County, documents the numerous eighteenth and nineteenth century adobe houses that are still standing in the metropolitan Los Angeles County area. An accompanying website offers insight to the books content, with an annotated table of contents that summarizes each section of the book and includes maps that allow for your own tour the 76 extant historic adobe structures in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area.

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Earth Building

Earth Building by Lawrence Keefe exlains, in fairly simple terms, the engineering properties of earth as a construction material. It describes, evaluates and compares the various methods earth construction and explains the failure mechanisms of mass earth walls and how to identify building defects. It also discusses, in some detail, how mass earth construction can achieve compliance with current building regulations and illustrates appropriate repair methods based upon case studies of actual building failures and major structural repairs. Professionals such as architects, builders, surveyors and conservation officers should find this a good reference. It is also a methodically presented text for students and an authoritative guide for self-builders.

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Building With Earth

Building with Earth by John Norton provides practical help in choosing whether and how to build with earth, from soil selection through to construction and maintenance. The techniques described in the second edition – revised and updated – of this book have a focus on achieving good quality results with accessible methods, that can go on being used by rich and poor, and for simple buildings as well as the more sophisticated.