Architecture, Design, and Culture using of mud, clay, soil, dirt & dust.
Abari is a not-for-profit organization that examines, encourages, and celebrates the vernacular architectural tradition of Nepal. Much of that tradition includes the use of mud brick as seen traditionally in Eastern Kathmandu and in their recent Gobi Adobe project.
The 2007 International Symposium on Earthen Structures will take place August 22-24, 2007 in Bangalore, India. The conference is jointly organized by the Department of Civil Engineering and Center for Sustainable Technologies at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath, U.K. and the Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics de L’Etate, Lyon, France. Form more information, download the conference brief.
Tokyo-based Loco Architects won a national Japanese competition for a concept house which aims to impinge as little as possible on the environment. When the house becomes redundant, its rammed earth walls can simply be demolished and returned to the ground. The project received mention in the AR Awards for Emerging Architecture.
Rammed Earth South Korea is a new blog with some curious rammed earth sculptures.
If only we could read Korean as this site seems to focus on traditional and experimental earth building techniques. You can translate the first page with babelfish but to navigate through the blog from the original page, scroll to the bottom and click the numbers. [ via ]
Aerial view of Earth buildings located at Chuxi Village, Xiayang town, Yongding County, in east China’s Fujian Province in this picture taken December 10, 2004. There are about 30,000 earth buildings, dating mostly from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, in the Fujian Province, southern and eastern China.
Yung Ho Chang, founder of Atelier FCJZ, the first private architectural firm in China, has been part of China’s tremendous transformation. One of Chang’s most notable works is his Split House, completed in 2002. Chang’s sensibility to materials fuses the traditional with modern design by using rammed earth, an ancient method for building.
The Construction of Clan Homes in Fujian website describes the marvelous multi-storied round dwellings of the Hakka People of China. Be sure to see the detailed drawings of these structures. [ Previously ]
A father and son team, Basanta and Nripal Adhikary from Nepal, are reintroducing adobe in the Gobi Desert as means to provide housing in an environment where there is little timber. [ read article | construction photos ]
Almost 100 meters of the Great Wall in Xinxing village, Zhongwei City was destroyed last month after being plundered for road building materials, according to Ningxia Daily. Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region has been called “the Great Wall Museum” because of its profusion of rammed earth sections, but it only took two nights on January 23 and 24 to wreck the Xinxing stretch.