Category: Africa

Belgian photograper Sebastian Schutyser spent nearly four years photographing the mud mosques of Mali. A collection of 200 such black & white photographs is now online at ArchNet. More at BLDGBLOG. Schutyser’s images have been collected in a book, co-written with Dorothee Gruner and Jean Dethier, entitled Banco: Adobe Mosques of the Inner Niger Delta.

Heinz Ruther, professor of Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, has embarked on a project aimed both at preserving the sites, and also at making them accessible – in virtual form – to people across the continent who may not have the means to get there themselves. BBC | Africast [via]

Ronald Rael, an architecture professor at the School of Architecture at Clemson University is working with the Utah based organization, Daily Dose foundation, former NBA player Soumaila Samake and villagers from Tentou, Mali, West Africa to design and build a school for the village’s 400 children using local construction techniques. Download press release (2.2mb .pdf)

They are west Africa’s most exciting, ambitious buildings. Some of them have lasted 700 years, and they’re made of dirt.

The Wildlife Works EcoFactory employs a team of eleven women sewing machine operators from the local community that were taught the skill of using modern electric sewing machines to produce Wildlife Works’ tees. To build the EcoFactory’s two buildings, we employed 150 local people for two years using Rammed Earth, and our construction team learned the skill of building thick, rammed-earth walls that keep the temperature constant and cool inside, no matter how hot it gets outside. The beauty of this eco-friendly solution is that it uses mostly soil from the site. [ Via African Architecture ]

These images of Ghanaian Earth Architecture are by Keith Zawistowski and Marie Richard. The image in the upper left is a shrine house in the Ashanti Region, near Kumasi. It is made from earth on a bamboo frame, detailed with cut reeds and plastered with cow dung. The others are of various typologies from the northern region. View larger image

Thousands of homeless Moroccans struggled to rebuild their lives after a powerful earthquake that killed nearly 600 people forced survivors to spend the night in the open. Hopes dimmed of finding any more people alive in the rubble of devastated mud-brick homes in villages scattered around the Mediterranean port city of Al Hoceima. The quake, measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale, struck early on Tuesday as many people were sleeping in their houses.

Researchers in Zimbabwe have been struggling to provide low cost houses, but now an answer may have been found. It turned out that the researchers did not need to go very far to come up with one of the best solutions to the problem. The Department of Science and Technology in the Office of the President and Cabinet is popularising the use of rammed earth as one of the cheapest ways of building a house.