Morocco recently experienced the most devastating earthquake that the country has had in the last 60 years. To date, more than 2,600 people have died and news outlets are quick to point out that the cause of death isn’t the earthquake, but the buildings made of earth. While I am aware of the thousands of mud brick and rammed earth buildings that define the villages in the Atlas Mountains where the disaster took place, I note that the photos of the devastation often show buildings made of reinforced concrete or concrete masonry units. The tendency to villainize earthen architecture traditions is a common practice. The headline of one article reads, “Morocco’s Mud Brick Housing Makes Hunt for Earthquake Survivors Harder” and yet the cover image is clearly of a reinforced concrete building. As I scroll through articles about the earthquake, I do see many earthen buildings that have been damaged, but I also see a large number of buildings constructed of industrially produced materials. In the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, three times the number of people died, and over 100,000 buildings were destroyed in a city that was largely constructed of concrete and steel. Kobe was a magnitude 6.9 earthquake similar to Morocco’s 6.8. The 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area caused an estimated $14 billion in damage to buildings, bridges, and highways with the majority of deaths happening under reinforced concrete structures like the Cyprus Street Viaduct.
The New York Times writes, “Mud brick buildings common to the region — some of which date back to before Morocco’s colonization by the French — were reduced to a collapsed sand castle.” France colonized Morocco in 1912, making many of the buildings older than 111 years old It should be pointed out that the seismic activity of these regions is high, and earthen building traditions have survived in seismic zones for thousands of years. The oldest buildings in every seismic zone are constructed of earth, including those found in the San Francisco Bay Area. A visit to downtown Sonoma, the Missions, the Petaluma Adobe, and countless other mud brick buildings demonstrate the longevity of earthen architecture in earthquake-prone regions. A visit to Santiago, Chile, a city with a history of earthquakes, will also demonstrate how earthen architecture has survived in many urban and rural environments while adapting to a ground that shakes.
Yes, buildings made of mud brick and rammed earth did collapse causing many deaths. However, reinforced concrete and concrete masonry units did as well — there simply happens to be more earthen buildings in that region, just as there are more reinforced concrete buildings in Kobe, Japan. And despite the reality that our continued quest to combat the forces of mother nature, we continue to find that she wins. But perhaps she is not the villain, nor is architecture made of earth. According to Bloomberg, man-made climate-related disasters due to climate change account are linked to approximately 5 million deaths per year and the concrete industry is responsible for about 8% of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. Earthquakes account for approximately 60,000 of those deaths, however, few of those are related to the collapse of earthen buildings. Some of those deaths are related to the collapse of buildings made with other materials, landslides, and tsunamis. Some earthquakes are a product of fracking and mining.
I do not believe that earth architecture is the villain in the tragedy in Morocco. Rather, it is the cultural perception of the building material, and the prejudices against those that live in them, within a capitalist society. Earth is an inherently ecological material, possesses excellent thermal mass properties, requires little embodied energy, and is recyclable—earth buildings can return to Earth. It should be noted that most of the recent Pritzker Prize winner Francis Kere’s buildings are constructed of mud, and as I wrote about in my book, Earth Architecture, a number of universities including the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, the University of Kassel, Germany, and the University of Technology, Sydney are advancing the technology of creating earthquake-resistant earth buildings. Let us look to solving the 5 million deaths per year due to climate change, and improve the technologies of earthen construction as humans have continued to do for the past 10,000 years of civilization before we eradicate large percentages of the population due to industrialized building practices that have not proven to safely house the planet, unlike our planetary traditions of earthen architecture.
