Architecture, Art, Design, and Culture using of mud, clay, soil, dirt & dust.
In 2002, University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeologists discovered a 3700-year-old “magical” birth brick inside the palatial residence of a Middle Kingdom mayor’s house just outside Abydos, in southern Egypt. The colorfully decorated mud birth brick, the first ever found, is one of a pair that would have been used to support a woman’s feet while squatting during actual childbirth.
The scene: a humble clay house on one of Baghdad’s meanest streets. A knock at the door. When the man of the house answers, he is astonished. “We have presents for you!” warbles Shaima Emad Zubair, a young siren with tangerine lipstick. Batting her blue-mascaraed eyes, she pokes her microphone his way. “Labor and Materials” is Iraq’s answer to “Extreme Home Makeover” and the country’s first reality TV show. In 15-minute episodes, broken windows are made whole again. Blasted walls slowly rise again.
The Residence at Meteor Vineyards in Napa Valley, California contains a guest house constructed of rammed earth that is comprised of a V-shaped roof floating above the massive walls. Read more.
Within the Institute of Archaeology at the University College London there are a number of projects concerned with the archaeology, conservation and study of earthen architecture. Their web page details the interests, projects and people involved in this small research group.
Architects Keith Zawistowski and Marie Richard, alumni of Rural Studio, recently built two rammed earth walls as a land art installation in the New Mexico desert. For this project, they collaborated with CRATerre to reaserch traditional earth building techniques and developed a slip form system for rammed earth, which eliminated form tie holes and can be handled by only two people. Using this system and earth mined from the site they constructed 220 foot long walls.
ARC Scottland (Architectural, Research or Conservation) has an archive of research reports on earth architecture available for download in .pdf format.
Photo Essays from the AREA Summer Research+Build workshop have been posted to the AREA 2004 website. visit at: www.areainstitute.org
The msn group, Archi-terra Fotos, is a small, but growing, collection of earth architecture from around the world.
Abstracts for the Earth Build 2005 Conference have been posted online.