Architecture, Art, Design, and Culture using of mud, clay, soil, dirt & dust.
In the only architectural treatise surviving from Classical Antiquity, Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture refers in some detail to adobe, describing suitable earth and suggesting that adobes should be made in the spring and left for at least two years to dry. He mentions that building by-laws in Utica (near Carhage) specify that only adobes of five years old be used for building, to be so certified by the aedile (magistrate).
The ceremonial enclosure of Khasekhemwy–Hierakonpolis’ only standing monument is built entirely of sun-dried mud brick, with walls 5 meters (16.4 feet) thick and still preserved in places to its original imposing height of 9 meters (29.5 feet). It is the oldest freestanding mud-brick structure in the world. For the third time, it has been listed with the World Monument Fund as one of the world’s 100 most endangered monuments. Decorated on its exterior with a pattern of recessed paneling or niches and originally plastered white, it must have been a striking sight in its time. Almost 5,000 years later, it stands as a testament to the abilities of its builder, King Khasekhemwy, the last ruler of the Second Dynasty (ca. 2686 B.C.), but the reasons for which it was built remain a mystery.
Singapore-based Australian Kerry Hill is regarded as one of the best regional architects utilising natural rammed earth, timber and stone that exude an almost monastic ambience. Built on the banks of WA’s Margaret River, Hill’s Ooi house (above) is a single-storey, three bedroom holiday residence with a guest chalet intended to be the first of several.
The Cotentin and Bessin Marshlands Regional Nature Park in France proposes to
create one moment of exchanges on cob building. A conference entitled “Cob
Building in Europe” is scheduled for the 12, 13 and 14th of October 2006, in
Isigny-sur-mer, Normandy, France. Download conference the program here
Commissioned by the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), structural engineer Toby Hodsdon of Buro Happold will build a 200-seat auditorium with rammed earth walls 7.2m high – the highest in the UK.
The Poeh Center Museum Building is the tallest adobe building in New Mexico. The four story tower was completed in 1996.
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 ]
The World Adobe Forum is an exciting new medium for the sharing of information related to adobe research and application, focusing on understanding and reducing seismic vulnerability. The main objective of the forum is to provide a medium for the sharing of information related to improved-adobe research and application.
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.