Belgian photograper Sebastian Schutyser spent nearly four years photographing the mud mosques of Mali. A collection of 200 such black & white photographs is now online at ArchNet. More at BLDGBLOG. Schutyser’s images have been collected in a book, co-written with Dorothee Gruner and Jean Dethier, entitled Banco: Adobe Mosques of the Inner Niger Delta.
The Nk’Mip Desert Interpretive Centre
The Nk’Mip Desert Interpretive Centre is finally open. View pictures at Rammed Earth is for Everyone
Rammed Earth Border
The New York Times challenged thirteen architects, landscape architects, and planners to consider the border zone between Mexico and the United States. The proposal by Albuquerque architect Antoine Predock suggests a rammed earth wall built by Mexican day laborers, rising from the ground.
Marcelo Cortes: Earth Architect
Chilean architect Marcelo Cortes employs an interesting hybrid between industrial and non-industrial technologies. Cortes has developed a “quincha metalica”, a form of traditional quincha construction (mud and straw packed between a bamboo or wood frame) that uses a steel frame work.
Gernot Minke
Prof. Dr. Gernot Minke is a professor at Universitat Kassel, where he leads the Forschungslabor fur Experimentelles Bauen. He has long concerned himself with developments in earth building, and he has dealt with the building material clay in theory and practice since 1977. Visit his website.
TerraBrasil 2006
El I SEMIN¡RIO – Arquitetura e Construção com Terra no Brasil e IV SEMIN¡RIO – Arquitectura de Terra em Portugal (The 1st Brasilian Confrence of Architecture and Construction in Earth and the 4th Conference of Earth Architecture in Portugal) will be held the 4th – 8th of November, 2006 in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Download conference information here (pdf).
Center for Alternative Technology
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.
Adobe Architecture of California
Spanish Colonial : or Adobe Architecture of California, 1800-1850
Hassan Fathy Web Site
The Hassan Fathy Web Site has a new URL:
Simone Swan: Adobe Building
Simone Swan: Adobe Building