Architecture, Art, Design, and Culture using of mud, clay, soil, dirt & dust.
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.
[ 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.
Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises, is a compendium of innovative projects from around the world that demonstrate the power of design to improve lives. The first book to bring the best of humanitarian architecture and design to the printed page, Design Like You Give a Damn offers a history of the movement toward socially conscious design and showcases more than 80 contemporary solutions to such urgent needs as basic shelter, health care, education, and access to clean water, energy, and sanitation. Among these projects you will find several built of some of the many earth construction techniques.
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.
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 is finally open. View pictures at Rammed Earth is for Everyone
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.
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.
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.
