Architecture, Art, Design, and Culture using of mud, clay, soil, dirt & dust.
Tel Dan, one of the more important sites in the Golan Heights near the Israel-Lebanon border, is better known for the world’s oldest intact arched gateway, a 4,000-year-old, mud-brick structure now protected under a modern shelter, but the site is under possible threat from a possible errant Hezbollah missile.
Quake Safe is a frame made from string, bamboo and wire, which can be either retrofitted into an existing adobe (mud brick) house or incorporated into a new house as it’s being built, in order to give it a much higher level of structural protection against earthquakes. The invention was created by Faculty of Engineering Ph.D Student at the University of Technology in Sydney, Dominic Dowling.
The frame is designed to be affordable to people who live in adobe houses, particularly the poorer rural communities of Central America.
[ interview | video ]
Population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, together with increasing desertification and regression of forested areas, means that the use of timber in traditional building techniques is no longer feasible and the alternative of using corrugated iron is expensive and thermally and acoustically problematic. The Association La Voute Nubienne’s primary objective is to persuade people to use the Nubian Vault technique as a valid alternative to traditional building methods in rural areas of Burkina Faso and neighboring countries of the Sahel. Using a simplified and codified adaptation of the classic Nubian vault technique which Hassan Fathy brought back into the public eye in the 1940’s. Thus far, some 200 vaults have been built in Burkina Faso, including a church and a mosque, and some two-story buildings, and over 40 builders have ben trained in the technique.
An interview with PhD candidate Paul Jaquin at Rammed Earth is for Everyone. Paul is the proprietor of Historic Rammed Earth Web Site and the Historic Rammed Earth Blog and has studied rammed earth buildings all over the world.
Designed and built between 1967 and 1974, the La Luz community was architect Antoine Predock’s first major commission. More uniquely, it was the first major townhouse development to be constructed entirely of adobe. For more information click here.
[ La Luz: The Light on the Mesa | Essay by Christopher Mead ]
The use of unburnt mud bricks commonly known as ‘rukarakara’ in the construction of houses is to be banned, the Minister of Infrastructure, Stanislas Kamanzi, has said. The Minister made the disclosure Wednesday 18, while responding to queries raised by legislators about the new plan to develop Kigali City.
Festive Earthen Building Events (FEBE), a program of Youth Empowerment America, invites youth and adults to help construct a mud brick building at 10 a.m. on Saturday, July 29 in southeast Atlanta.
Work is about to begin on The Wales Institute for Sustainable Education (WISE), a new complex intended to showcase the very latest thinking in environmentally-conscious building design at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), near Machynlleth in Wales. Among the innovative features of the building will be construction of rammed earth walls in the Institute’s lecture theatre. The 7.2m high rammed earth walls, which are load-bearing and made of excavated subsoil, exemplify this approach. The clay content of the soil means no additional binding material will have to be added. The walls are packed down in layers, using hand-held pneumatic compactors, between temporary formwork.
read more here: Rammed Earth at the Center for Alternative Technology
Spanish Colonial : or Adobe Architecture of California, 1800-1850
Simone Swan: Adobe Building