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Do Some “Good” with the Voute Nubian For Burkina Faso

The Voute Nubienne Association has recently made an agreement with an eco-urban property developer in California, LJUrban, that, for every house they sell in their ‘Good’ project in Sacramento, and for every 10,000 clicks on their project website, they’ll fund the training of one VN mason in our Programme in Burkina Faso. This is very important for us, as the main brake on development of our ‘Earth roofs in the Sahel’ programme is the speed at which new apprentices can be recruited and trained to meet the demand for VN houses, to replace the dreadful tin-roof shacks in which so many poor families in the Sahel live.

If you want to help, please go to their website at:

http://www.lavoutenubienne.org/spip.php?page=sommaire&lang=en

and click on the ‘Goodometer’ you’ll find there—it’s that easy! Even easier, just click on Goodometer below.

Please encourage your friends to do likewise…every click counts!

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New Orleans Marine Hospital 1867 was Rammed Earth


The all-iron Marine Hospital, innovative in its day, yet doomed by construction costs. Photo / Theodore Lilienthal

A new book of essays, New Orleans 1867: Photographs by Theodore Lilienthal, on rediscovered photographs of New Orleans in 1867, written by the curator of architecture and design at the MIT Museum, shows how the city tried to rebuild its economy and retrieve its prestige in the aftermath of war. One of the photographs is of a vast, domed building under construction at the edge of the city turned out to be the Marine Hospital, New Orleans’ version of Boston’s Big Dig. The iron building, insulated with rammed earth, was thought to be lighter and therefore better suited to swampy local conditions, as well as fireproof. The proposal was innovative but the technology was costly, a sinkhole of federal money. Never completed, eventually demolished, the hospital was one of the most advanced buildings of its time, but it has been forgotten today.

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Architect Nader Khalili Memorial

On Saturday March 29th, from 11:00 am throughout the afternoon, Nader Khalili’s surviving family and students invite all who were his friends and supporters to remember and celebrate his life, words and works, at his Cal-Earth Institute, in Hesperia, California, amongst his visionary architecture. Rather than flowers, please send a contribution to a charity which helps the poor and refugees, in his name. [ directions | previously ]

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Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

Dirt, soil, call it what you want–it’s everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it’s no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery explores the compelling idea that we are–and have long been–using up Earth’s soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology, Dirt traces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward. We see how soil has shaped us and we have shaped soil–as society after society has risen, prospered, and plowed through a natural endowment of fertile dirt. David R. Montgomery sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations.

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Nader Khalili Dies at 72


Nader Khalili


Superadobe Structure

Iranian-born architect and author, Nader Khalili, passed away at the age of 72 on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008. Khalili was known for his invention of an Earthbag Construction technique called Super Adobe, which use sand bags, mud and barbed wire to build emergency shelters in areas affected by natural and man-made disasters. His books, Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own and Racing Alone document his life of searching for a method to fire mud houses and turn them to stone by firing and glazing an entire building after it is constructed from clay-earth on site. He is the founder of The California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture, whose scope spans technical innovations published by NASA for lunar base construction, to design and development of housing for the world’s homeless for the United Nations.

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About EarthArchitecture.org

EarthArchitecture.org began February 22, 2003 as the research of Ronald Rael—currently Professor and Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture at the University of California Berkeley. The compilation of the research on the earth architecture website led to the publication of Earth Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008, paperback edition, 2010), which examines the contemporary history of the oldest and most widely used building material on the planet—dirt.

The book provides a history of building with earth in the modern era, focusing particularly on projects constructed in the last few decades that use rammed earth, mud brick, compressed earth, cob, and several other interesting techniques. Earth Architecture presents a selection of more than forty projects that exemplify new, creative uses of the oldest building material on the planet. With more than three hundred images, Earth Architecture showcases the beauty and simplicity of one of humankind’s most evolved and sophisticated building technologies. The research was funded by the Graham Foundation for Constructed Topographies: Earth Architecture in the Landscape of Modernity, and the Architectural League of New York’s Deborah Norden Competition for Wadi Hadramut: Cities of Earth (2000).

The website reaches far more broadly, looking at all aspects of humankind’s relationship to making things with mud, dirt, dust and the effects that our making traditions have impacted contemporary culture, from music, architecture, art, pottery, and 3D printing.

In 2009 Eartharchitecture.org was ranked among the top 20 most important blogs on architecture worldwide measured by the number of subscribers (Google Reader + Bloglines) and the number of hits in Google (Google + Google Images). In 2014 the website was abandoned, but is now an online resource that will continue to be updated regularly and hosted under the hospice of the non-profit organization, Adobe Archipelago, a 501c3.