Hassan Fathy

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The Hassan Fathy web site is the first, and perhaps the most comprehensive, website on the great Egyptian architect. The site documents 105 projects with photos, essays and drawings and is available in English, French and Arabic.

AREA: Design + Build in Marfa, Texas

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PROGRAM DATES FOR AREA SUMMER DESIGN+BUILD

June 1 – July 1 2005

AREA is a summer research+build workshop that engages a 90 year old abandoned mud-brick building, located in the town of Marfa, Texas, as the testing grounds for questioning the notion of detail, the theme of this years inquiry. Through a series of explorations that examine the process of making and unmaking in architecture, participants will design and build full-scale interventions that respond to a critical examination of place and program while addressing local/global and industrial/non-industrial agendas for architecture by employing raw earth as the primary building material in these investigations. Marfa serves as an ideal laboratory from where to study these issues. It is a town constructed almost entirely from mud-brick and transformed by rich historical, cultural and geographic forces. At 5,000 feet above sea level, it is one of the oldest cultivated areas in the United States. Located 60 miles from the U.S./Mexico border, Marfa is also home to the Chinati Foundation, an internationally renowned contemporary art museum, founded by Donald Judd, whose emphasis is on works in which art and the surrounding landscape are inextricably linked. Participants will have the opportunity to visit this extraordinary cultural and geographic landscape through a series of directed and self-guided field-studies. AREA is an initiative of the School of Architecture at Clemson University and made possible in part by the Adobe Alliance, a non-profit organization committed to the dissemination of traditional earth building technologies.

MORE INFORMATION AT: www.areainstitute.org

In Situ

In Situ is a U.K. based rammed earth company devoted to rammed earth construction, consultancy and research.

Adobe Towns

“Adobe Towns” series of 3 films first screened at the LEHM 2004 in Leipzig last year can soon be seen on TV on the French/German/Swiss channel “arte” and the German channel “Sudwest fernsehen”. More information about the films can be read here: http://www.filmquadrat.de/gb/adobetowns.htm

Title:
1. Adobe Towns: Djenné – City on the edge of the desert
2. Adobe Towns: Shibam – Chicago of the desert
3. Adobe Towns: Yazd – Desert Oasis in Iran

Djenné
14.03.2005, 19.00 on ARTE
22.05.2005, 17.15 on SUDWEST Fernsehen

Yazd
15.03.2005, 19.00 on ARTE
29.05.2005, 17.15 on SUDWEST Fernsehen

Shibam
16.03.2005, 19.00 on ARTE
12.06.2005, 17.15 on SUDWEST Fernsehen

Authors/Directors:
Djenné, Yazd: Thomas Wartmann
Shibam: Stefan Tolz

Production: Filmquadrat 2004

The Tarim Conservation Project

The Tarim Conservation Project website documents the preservation of historic palaces of the Hadhramaut Valley in Tarim, Yemen. The principal investigators are art historian/archaeologist Dr. Selma Al-Radi, co-director of the ‘Amiriya Restoration Project in Rada’, Yemen, and architect/architectural conserator Pamela Jerome, an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and a senior associate with Wank Adams Slavin Associates, a New York architecture and engineering firm. The trainees will be students from the historic preservation program of the GSAPP, along with Museum of the Hadhramaut personnel, and architecture students from the University of Mukallah. The significance of the Tarimi palaces and the fact that most of them are undocumented led us to propose their listing on the World Monuments Fund 100 Most Endangered Sites list for 2000-01. We have just received word that the site has been selected for re-listing on the 100 Most Endangered Sites list for 2002-03. Be sure to check out the visual resources page.