JONES STUDIO HOUSES: Sensual Modernism

Jones Studio Homes: Sensual Modernism is a self-imposed limited look at the 40-year-plus career of Eddie Jones. Almost unheard of outside the southwest United States, Jones has quietly accumulated a body of work ranging beyond residential design to include major federal projects impacting the edges of America… to be featured in a soon to be published monograph!

Supported by Aaron Betsky’s insightful forward, plus an enlightening interview with Vladimir Belogolovsky, and comments from many of his famous colleagues, Jones summarizes his lifelong dance with architecture through the personal stories embedded in each house. Refusing to repeat himself, the work tests the reality of gravity on a diverse spectrum of interpretive vernacular responses to climate, landscape and function. Although designed by the same hand, the forms vary as much as the choice of materials. Rammed earth, concrete, wood and metal are explored together and separately yet remain subordinate to Jones’ fascination with glass.

Utilizing photographs, hand-drawings and first-person accounts, the motivations and joy of being an architect are expressed by an exceptional whole informed by many ordinary parts.

Building with Cob

 

Building with Cob (2006) by Adam Weismann & Katy Bryce

Before founding a world leading clay plaster company, Clayworks Ltd, Adam Weismann and Katy Bryce specialised in earth building, with a particular love of Cob. The couple built many cob structures, with clients including HRH Prince of Wales, and finished the exteriors in Lime and the interiors in Clay. It was during this time that Adam and Katy developed a particular interest in clay plaster finishes. Their book, Building with Cob: A Step-by-Step Guide (Sustainable Building) shows how to apply this ancient technique in a wide variety of contemporary situations, covering everything from design and siting, mixing, building walls, fireplaces, ovens and floors, lime and other natural finishes, and gaining planning permission and building regulation approval. It also explains in detail how to sensitively restore an old cob structure.

Building with Cob was described by David Pearson (Author of The New Natural House Book) as ‘An inspiring vision and practical guide to one of the most versatile building materials’.

Keith Hall, Editor of Building for a Future magazine, concluded ‘This has got to be the most practical and beautifully illustrated book on earth building every published’.

The highly illustrated book, abundant with photographs, has step by step instructions for creating cob structures as well as information on natural finishes including lime plasters and home-made clay finishes. It also contains advice on how to construct a cob building that complies with modern building standards and guidance on restoring and repairing old cob structures.

Upscaling Earth: Material, Process, Catalyst


As environmental pressures continue to increase and concerns about resource scarcity continue to grow, a number of prominent architectural thinkers are returning to one of the world’s oldest construction methods: earth building. Upscaling Earth: Material, Process, Catalyst, by Anna Heringer, Lindsay Blair Howe, and Martin Rauch, showcases innovative thinking about materials and the potential for earth building to replace more environmentally damaging, resource-intensive materials like concrete. What economic, environmental, and social conditions, the book asks, would be necessary for an upscaling of earth to occur?

Presenting a wide range of built and unbuilt projects and outlining strategies that can be implemented to adapt the use of earth to each unique culture and context, Upscaling Earth demonstrates groundbreaking technological innovations that highlight the advantages of this material. From worldwide availability to the possibility of comprehensive recycling, from climate-neutral production to socially just implementation, the book reveals the incredible potential of earthen architecture.

Buy Upscaling Earth: Material, Process, Catalyst at Amazon.com

The Art of Earth Architecture: Past, Present, Future


For almost ten thousand years, unbaked earth has been used to build remarkable structures, from simple dwellings to palaces, temples, and fortresses both grand and durable. Jean Dethier spent fifty years researching this landmark global survey, which spans five continents and 250 sites. The Art of Earth Architecture: Past, Present, Future demonstrates the wide-ranging applications and sustainability of this building material, while presenting a manifesto for its ecological significance. Featuring raw-earth masterpieces, monumental structures, and little known works, the book includes the temples and palaces of Mesopotamia, the Great Wall of China, large-scale urban developments in Tenochtitlan in Mexico, the medinas of Morocco, and housing in Marrakech and Bogota.

This definitive reference features many UNESCO World Heritage sites and contains essays on the historical, technical, and cultural aspects of raw-earth construction from twenty experts in the field, as well as hundreds of photographs, illustrations, and architectural drawings.

Buy The Art of Earth Architecture: Past, Present, Future at Amazon

House of Earth / Woody Guthrie


“In El Rancho Grande,” by Woody Guthrie (1936; Santa Fe, N.M.), oil on board.

The legendary Woody Guthrie, an American folk singer, was also a brilliant and distinctive prose stylist, whose writing is distinguished by a homespun authenticity, deep-seated purpose and remarkable ear for dialect. These attributes are on vivid display in Guthrie’s long-lost “House of Earth,” his only fully realized, but yet unpublished, novel written as a direct response to the Dust Bowl. In December 1936 the rambling troubadour had an epiphany while busking for tips in New Mexico. He’d traveled there after a treacherous duster whacked the Texas Panhandle town of Pampa, where he’d been living in poverty. While in New Mexico, Guthrie became transfixed by an adobe hacienda’s sturdy rain spouts and soil-straw bricks, a simple yet solid weatherproof structure unlike most of his Texan friends’ homes, which were poorly constructed with flimsy wooden boards and cheap nails.

An immediate convert, Guthrie purchased a nickel pamphlet, “Adobe or Sun-Dried Brick for Farm Buildings,” from the United States Department of Agriculture. The manual instructed poor rural folk on building adobe homes from the cellar up. All an amateur needed was a home-brew of clay loam, straw and water. Guthrie promoted this U.S.D.A. guide with wild-eyed zeal. Adobes, he boasted, would endure the Dust Bowl better than wooden aboveground structures that were vulnerable to wind, snow, dust and termites. If sharecroppers and tenant farmers could only own a piece of land — even the uncultivable territory of arroyos and red rocks — they could build a “house of earth” that would protect them from dirt blowing in through cracks in the walls.

Read more in an article Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp in the New York Times

Salma Samar Damluji Wins Global Award for Sustainable Architecture

Salma Samar Damluji, an Iraqi architect and researcher educated in the UK, pupil of Hassan Fathy and author of The Architecture of Yemen, who has dedicated her life to the safeguarding and redesign of Earthen Architecture in the fascinating but highly dangerous Yemen is the recipient of the Global Ward for Sustainable Architecture. The Global Award Ceremony will be held at the Cité de l´Architecture in Paris on April 13.

Earth Building: History, Science and Conservation

Earth Building: History, Science and Conservation by Paul Jaquin, covers various types of earth construction including adobe, cob and rammed earth. It presents a wide-ranging review of the history of earth building, tracing the development of earthen construction techniques from antiquity to the present day, and showing the development of the techniques with both time and geography. The behaviour of earth building materials is explained using, for the first time, principles from soil mechanics. There is a detailed discussion of strategies for the analysis and conservation of earth buildings to enable engineers, conservation professionals and architects to understand and preserve earth buildings better in the future. Richly illustrated with photographs and diagrams, this book provides an invaluable tool for the conservation of earth buildings.

Paul Jaquin is the author of the website, Historic Rammed Earth, which grew out of his PhD research at the University of Durham.

Small Scale Big Change

The role of the global architect in society is changing. Instead of waiting for commissions to come their way, architects are initiating and developing practical solutions in response to dramatically changing living conditions in many parts of the world today. Small Scale, Big Change
focuses on a central chapter of this shift, presenting recently built or under-construction works, many of which are constructed of earth, in underserved communities around the globe by these 11 architects and firms: Elemental (Chilean); Anna Heringer (Austrian); Diebedo Francis Kere (Burkinabe); Hashim Sarkis A.L.U.D. (Lebanese); Jorge Mario Jauregui (Brazilian); Frederic Druot, Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal (French); Michael Maltzan Architecture (American); Noero Wolff Architects (South African); Rural Studio (American); Estudio Teddy Cruz (American, born Guatemala); and Urban Think Tank (American/Austrian/Venezuelan).

Without sacrificing concern for aesthetics, these architects have developed projects that reveal a post-utopian specificity of place; their architectural solutions emerge from close collaboration with future users and sustained research into local conditions. The projects–which include schools, parks, housing and infrastructural interventions–reveal an exciting change in the longstanding dialogue between architecture and society, as the architect’s roles, methods, approaches and responsibilities are dramatically reevaluated. They also offer an expanded definition of sustainability that moves beyond experimentation with new materials and technologies to encompass larger concepts of social and economic sustainability. Small Scale, Big Change examines the evolving standards of responsibility and participation in architecture and the ways in which architects can engage critically with larger social, economic and political issues currently facing communities around the world.

Arquitectura Con Tierra en Uruguay

Arquitectura con tierra en Uruguay is a book that offers a tour of fifteen case studies of buildings constructed with earth in Montevideo, Canelones, Maldonado, Rocha and Salto, Uruguay. One of the most significant characteristics of this type of construction technology in Uruguay is the amount of new work, which makes a difference to other countries in the region. This publication presents the works of several architects and builders from 1996 to 2009 in a compilation of 250 photographs and charts.

Arquitectura con tierra en Uruguay makes clear the living traditions of ancient technologies that are increasingly valued. This book is available in Uruguay in the Faculty of Architecture Library (Bulevar Artigas 1031, Montevideo) and in the Library of the Society of Architects of Uruguay (Gonzalo Ramírez 2030, Montevideo). It can be purchased elsewhere through www.entrelibros.com.uy

To preview the contents of the publication visit www.arquitecturacontierra.com.uy

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Arquitectura con tierra en Uruguay es un libro que propone una recorrida por quince casos de construcciones con tierra en los departamentos de Montevideo, Canelones, Maldonado, Rocha y Salto. Una de las características más significativas de este tipo de tecnología constructiva en Uruguay es la cantidad de obra nueva que marca la diferencia con respecto a otros países de la región. En esta publicación se recopilan las obras de varios arquitectos y constructores desde 1996 a 2009 a través de 250 fotografías y gráficos elaborados especialmente.

Arquitectura con tierra en Uruguay da cuenta de la siempre viva actualidad de técnicas milenarias que vuelven a cobrar valor. Este libro se puede adquirir en Uruguay en la Librería de Facultad de Arquitectura (Bulevar Artigas 1031, Montevideo) y en la Librería de la Sociedad de Arquitectos del Uruguay (Gonzalo Ramírez 2030, Montevideo). Puede ser adquirido desde el exterior a través del sitio www.entrelibros.com.uy

Para ver un avance del contenido de la publicación viste www.arquitecturacontierra.com.uy

Arquitectura con tierra en Uruguay – Autor: Alejandro Ferreiro – 120 páginas – 17 x 24 cm – ISBN 978-9974-98-153-9. Alejandro Ferreiro es arquitecto egresado de la Facultad de Arquitectura (UdelaR) en 2005. Se desempeña como docente de la cátedra de Arquitectura y Tecnología y ha participado como capacitador a partir de 2002 en distintas actividades y jornadas universitarias de transferencia tecnológica. Desde el año 2008 comienza a trabajar como profesional liberal en proyectos de arquitectura con tierra y materiales naturales.