Architecture, Art, Design, and Culture using of mud, clay, soil, dirt & dust.
The Redding Residence, designed by Kendle Design Collaborative, is an 8,300-square-foot home located in a gated Scottsdale, Arizona community. The house has won the prestigious Golden Nugget award for custom homes from the Pacific Coast Builders Conference and was featured on the Arizona AIA tour of homes this spring.
Pigeon houses at Mit Gahmr, Egypt
Pigeon is a part of the daily diet in many parts of Egypt and Pigeon houses, or dovecotes, are constructed from mud brick create an artificial mountainous topography. The droppings are also a valuable source of fertilizer and the houses are so ubiquitous that they are also part of the Egyptian national identity. The dovecote typology can be found throughout the world and Earth Architecture has previously featured the palomares of Spain.
Interestingly, the Egyptian pigeon houses remind one of the recent work of architect Vicente Guallart, who in his project The Re-Naturalization of Territory, attempts to create what could be considered as dovecotes for biotechnology and cinema in Tarragona, Spain.
In collaboration with Ramboll UK, the Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering at the University College London has funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for an EngD studentship (4 year programme) for the following project: INNOVATIVE CONCEPTS FOR SEISMICALLY RESISTANT MUD BRICK CONSTRUCTION. Click here to download the project description.
The secret of a successful sandcastle could aid the revival of an ancient eco-friendly building technique, according to research led by Durham University. Researchers, led by experts at Durham’s School of Engineering, have carried out a study into the strength of rammed earth, which is growing in popularity as a sustainable building method.
Front Range Earth Architecture: Why and Why Not?, written by Michael Shernick, is a paper that looks at the history and viability of earth architecture on Colorado’s Front Range. Click here to download the paper in PDF format.
Photo: Jacob Ehrenberg, Copyright © 2009 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
British artist, Andy Goldsworthy, is planning to produce a work using 4 to 5ft (1.2 to 1.5m) “stones” made from objects embedded in rammed earth. The stones will eventually disintegrate to reveal whatever material he decides to leave inside each one. Each stone will be made with earth containing materials and objects. These will be incorporated into each stone as it is being constructed and might be rocks, branches, bones, tools, seeds, clothes, beach debris or anything else.
The project is reminiscent of Smiljan Radic’s Casa del Carbonero. This is not Goldsworthy’s first foray into earth art. His project, Clay Wall, is a large clay plastered wall that uses human hair from his home village as a binder.
Church of the Holy Cross
Interior
After years of waiting, the historic rammed earth Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross in Stateburg is ready to begin renovations. The church, built between 1850 and 1852, was declared a national landmark in 1978. The building is of particular historic significance because of its “unusual construction of rammed earth known as pise de terre.”
An old way of life is coming to a crashing end in north-western China with two-thirds of Kashgar’s Old City being bulldozed over the past few weeks under a government plan to “modernise” the area. Nine hundred families already have been moved from Kashgar’s Old City, “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia,” as the architect and historian George Michell wrote in the 2008 book “Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old Silk Road.” Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.
Building earthen structures like bread ovens and small animal pens is a technique many Palestinians are familiar with, but extending the method to houses isn’t a notion that has taken hold in Gaza. But Jihad el-Shaar, who lived with his wife and four daughters with extended family wanted to build a home of their own. After waiting for two years, it was apparent that the siege would make cement unavailable so he decided to build his house of mud.
Photo by Yasmina Rossi.
“The allure of elegant earthen architecture can be life-changing. At least that was the case for urbane New Yorker Simone Swan, who in the 1970s became fascinated with the ideas and designs of renowned Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. Then the 40-something executive head of the Houston-based Menil Foundation, Swan moved to Cairo to study with Fathy. She became his most passionate advocate, and transplanted his adobe building techniques to the Southwestern United States.”
