Tag: historic

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Tiébélé Houses, Burkina Faso

Tiébélé’s houses are an outstanding example of vernacular architecture as cultural art. They reveal how a community’s beliefs, social structure and environment can be woven into the very fabric of its buildings. The communal process with all villagers building and decorating each home is a model of collaboration and knowledge sharing.

In each family compound, men do the work of building in the dry season, while women handle all decorative painting and plastering just before the rainy season. Women are the sole keepers of the mural designs, they learn the motifs from elders and pass them to daughters through hands-on training. Because this is a vernacular tradition, there is no formal architect and knowledge is transmitted orally. Builders and painters all live locally in Tiébélé and nearby Kassena villages, motivated by communal duty and cultural obligation.

Because every villager participates, house building is a cultural rite. The communal construction and decoration serves as a vital means of passing Kassena culture across generations. Women, as the “sole guardians” of the mural tradition, use the process to teach daughters the ancestral patterns during large gatherings. In this way, intangible knowledge is preserved.

The core of the village is the Royal Court of Tiébélé, a walled clan compound that serves as the chief’s residence and ceremonial center. From this core, family compounds with painted houses grow outward in a roughly circular, fractal pattern. A narrow labyrinth of alleys links the houses, which aids communal life and defense, reflecting a tightly clustered form.

Tiébélé’s architecture is a living expression of Kasena culture. The built form and murals encode the community’s social organization, beliefs and history. For example, the compound is organized into five social domains and the choice of house shape immediately signals the occupant’s age, gender, and status. Dinia houses (30–40 m²) are irregular hourglass-shaped houses formed by two circular rooms joined by a narrow corridor reserved for elders, widows, unmarried women and children. These sprawling structures often form the nucleus of a compound.

Mangolo houses (20–30 m²) are a simple rectangular hut used by young married couples.  It is a more recent addition to Kasena architecture signifying social transition. Interiors may have a clay bench or seating ledge along one wall. These rectangular houses line the edges of the compounds or fill remaining plots.

Adolescent or unmarried men live in Draa huts (9–12 m²), a round single‑room with a thatch roof and an opening at the top under the eaves for ventilation. The Draa keeps community youth together and allows elders to oversee them easily, and the low door and dark interior teach discipline and security. Each family compound also contains outside kitchens and hearths, granaries, silos, and small altars or shrines to ancestors.

Most strikingly, every wall is a painted canvas of abstract symbols. The facades display red, white and black geometric murals (triangles, crosses, zigzags, animal and plant motifs). These motifs have deep meanings referencing Kassena folklore, animism and daily life (stars for hope, arrows for defense, animals for fertility and protection). While the particular symbols vary, every Kassena home is elaborately painted to express identity and beliefs, and to distinguish it from others in the village.

The architecture also serves practical needs. Thick earth walls stabilize indoor temperatures and resist attacks, small openings protect privacy and security, and the annual repainting waterproofs the walls just before the rainy season. In this harsh environment, such design is both symbolic and sensible, a key reason the Kassena have kept it unchanged for centuries.

Houses are built entirely from local natural materials. Walls are made of earth mixed with chopped straw and cow dung, either molded by hand or formed into adobe blocks. The walls are around 30 cm thick to buffer heat and cold. Foundations use rough stone or fired laterite to protect from erosion. Ceilings are low, often two meters high or less to expedite plastering. Roofs are flat made with wooden beams overlain by layers of packed earth or clay then laterite. This layered roof when compacted and patched with dung sheds rain but must be periodically re-plastered.

Construction is communal and new houses are built during the dry season. Houses have intentionally minimal openings as a defense measure inherited from times of conflict, with almost no windows and doorways only about two feet high, forcing entrants to stoop. Just before the rainy season, all village women gather to plaster and decorate each house. They first roughen and coat the dry mud walls, then paint by hand in the planned design. Pigments are prepared from local minerals mixed with water and clay (red from laterite soil, white from chalk, black from charred basalt or plant charcoal). After painting, each color is burnished with a stone, and finally the entire surface is varnished with a boiled African locust bean fruit solution. Tools may include feathers, combs or sticks for patterning. Throughout the process, the oldest woman present directs the patterns and sequences, ensuring the motifs are executed properly. Because every household participates, the decoration of a house is as much a social ceremony as a construction task. Family members give food and drinks to workers as payment, ensuring communal participation.

Tiébélé values local materials, sustainability and cultural context. These houses teach that design can be participatory and deeply symbolic, not just functional. In a world of standardized construction, Tiébélé’s earthen buildings remind us of the beauty of craft, community and continuity. The result is an inseparable fusion of architecture and art, every building is a cultural statement, unique yet part of a grand communal ensemble.

Citations:

  1. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1713/gallery/&index=37&maxrows=12
  2. https://globalgaz.com/tiebele-painted-houses/
  3. https://www.allisongreenwald.com/dora
  4. https://unusualplaces.org/the-painted-village-of-burkina-faso-africa/#:~:text=But%20it%E2%80%99s%20the%20decoration%20of,from%20the%20leaves%20of%20acacia
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Juana Briones House Demolished

The Juana Briones House, a rare example of encajonado construction, parts of which were built in 1844, has been completely torn down by property owner Jaim Nulman, who fought off historic preservationists, latino activists, and descendants of Briones for years. Feminists joined in the struggle for the home’s preservation as well. Jeanne McDonnell, biographer of Juana Briones, stated that historic buildings associated with women are more likely to be demolished than those associated with men.

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Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments

Books on architectural history and theory often overlook mud and dust as a material of architecture and cities. As author David Gissen points out in his new book, “Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments“, the eradication of mud from urban environments is often seen as a form of cultural advancement. “Massive paving projects were undertaken to remove muddy pockets from the centers of cities, and drainage efforts eliminated mud from most public parklands. The appearance of mud [in the ninetieth and twentieth centuries] became emblematic of urban engineering failures and impending pathologies”, writes Gissen. He then goes on to describe the expanded potential for this material from a historical and theoretical perspective in projects such as de Paor architects pavillion for the Venice Bienale, which was constructed of 21 tons of Irish peat and Otero-Pailos’s The Ethics of Dust, and experimental preservation project which captures an interiors dust in latex that is then assembled as an interior facade. The book is not about fashionable topics surrounding sustainability and ecology. With chapters on smoke, dankness, debris, exhaust, weeds and other counter-architectural conditions, Gissen seeks to expand one’s perception of truly alternative materials in a positively original way.

Book Description
We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today’s discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these ‘subnatural forces’ are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today’s leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice.

The exhilarating and at times unsettling work featured in Subnature suggests an alternative view of natural processes and ecosystems and their relationships to human society and architecture. R&Sien’s Mosquito Bottleneck house in Trinidad uses a skin that actually attracts mosquitoes and moves them through the building, while keeping them separate from the occupants. In his building designs the architect Philippe Rahm draws the dank air from the earth and the gasses and moisture from our breath to define new forms of spatial experience. In his Underground House, Mollier House, and Omnisport Hall, Rahm forces us to consider the odor of soil and the emissions from our body as the natural context of a future architecture. [Cero 9]’s design for the Magic Mountain captures excess heat emitted from a power generator in Ames, Iowa, to fuel a rose garden that embellishes the industrial site and creates a natural mountain rising above the city’s skyline. Subnature looks beyond LEED ratings, green roofs, and solar panels toward a progressive architecture based on a radical new conception of nature.

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New Deal Rammed Earth

The rammed earth houses on Rosemary Road in Mount Olive, Alabama, were built in the 1930s. They were constructed with dirt, taken from the site, which was mixed with red-rock aggregate and tamped between wooden forms. The homes were built as part of a New Deal Resettlement Administration homestead community. The surprisingly sophisticated one-story houses, designed by architect Thomas Hibben, are reminiscent of the low-slung, prairie-style houses designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The government was not sure of the lasting quality of these rammed earth homes and required that they be located at the back of the project, so as to not be too visible if they collapsed, but all the rammed earth houses of Mount Olive are still standing today. Images of the buildings at the time of their construction can be found here.

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Mud and the Automobile

A curious relationship between mud brick architecture,clay and the automobile exists in two very important earthen architecture building cultures: among the Ndebele people of South Africa, whose vividly painted mud brick houses have been transposed to the automobile, and in northern New Mexico where the descendants of the Indigenous Pueblo people and Spanish colonists created a unique style of mud brick architecture from which emerged the invention of the lowrider.

Ndebele

The Ndebele people of South Africa are famous for the the colorful patterns applied to the exterior of their houses, which are made of a mixture of dung, mud, and clay. Their distinctive house-painting style, originally based on a similar but less colourful style originally developed by the Northern Sotho or Pedi, flowered and achieved its creative pinnacle within the almost slave-like conditions which the Ndebele endured on the white-owned farms of the south-eastern Transvaal during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.


Ndebele house

The almost exclusively female creators of these arts have for decades been borrowing elements from the social and cultural repertoires both of their neighbours and of modern industrial society. Peter Rich writes, “The strength of Ndebele spatial models and aesthetic grammar allowed them to invest images reinterpreted from other cultures, with their own symbolic meaning. They had an affinity with the stylised art deco that was prevalent in cities such as Pretoria in the 1940s and ’50s. The changing trends in Western society, notably the American car culture of the ’50s, fashion and infatuation with images of power/electricity/jet aeroplanes, were other catalysts. ‘We see what we want to see and make it our own’, proclaims a Ndebele matriarch.”


Application of paint to earthen wall

Because of the striking designs adorning the houses, tourists drove great distances to see the Ndebele, often from as far away as Johanasburg, which was 100 miles away. According to Elizabeth Ann Schneider, the Ndebele women noticed the license plates on the cars and although they could not read them, they liked the shapes of the letters and numbers and began to paint them on their earthen walls. They mirrored the shapes of these forms to create symmetrical patterns on the front of their houses. Wavy designs known as “tire tracks” are still sometimes applied to walls and also appear on floors.


Modern “BMW” Ndebele House

‘Mural decoration is the prerogative of the woman; it denotes her unique and intimate relationship with the indlu (home) and her passive response to being exploited socially and politically,’ wrote Margaret Courtney-Clarke in Ndebele, but with the pressures of a modern era, the Ndebele women became increasingly dependent upon the automobile to find work in cities that were a good distance from their villages. This cultural shift led to the application of Ndebele motifs, which until then used the car as inspiration, to the car itself.


Car decorated with Ndebele paintings in Pretoria, South africa.

Many Ndebele women became well known for their craft and the most celebrated of these artists is Esther Nikwambi Mahlangu. Born in Middleburg in 1936, she was invited in 1989 to exhibit at the Pompidou Art Museum in Paris. In 1991, she was invited to paint a prototype of the new BMW 525i model. Esther’s car, eleventh in the Art Car Collection, was the first to be decorated by a woman artist and as a black woman artist from a little-known South African community to be included in a prestigious international artistic line-up of artists including Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and David Hockney made this fact all the more exceptional.


Esther Mahlangu’s Ndebele BMW

In 2008 Mahlangu was invited to paint another car—this time the new Fiat 500.


Mahlangu next to her Fiat 500

Today, calling attention to the automobile’s long relationship with the the architecture of the Ndebele, an old car, painted in this evolving tradition, joins a sign announcing the entrance to the famous mud brick village of Lesedi.


Sign at the entrance to the village of Lesedi.

New Mexico

Mud brick was the principal building material Northern New Mexico from the founding of the first European colony in 1598 until the mid 20th century, and hand formed mud had been used in to construct multi-story dwellings for thousands of years prior. Industrialization, mining and the lure of jobs in cities transformed what was largely agrarian society in New Mexico into a society increasingly dependent upon the automobile to travel the great distances from the isolated villages to cities and the mines in central Colorado.


The San José de Gracia Church, built between 1760 and 1776 and considered a model of the adobe architecture found throughout New Mexico. Here the church can be seen through the windshield of Levi Lobato’s 1972 Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

From the desire to bring with them a piece of home from a landscape in which the people were deeply rooted, emerged the lowrider—a chapel on wheels that evoked the essence of the ancient baroque mud brick churches that were at the center of village life.


Dave’s Dream as displayed in the Smithsonian Museum’s former Road Transportation hall, with photomural of the El Santuario de Chimayo, and an assembly of trophies won by this lowrider automobile. Photo by Jeff Tinsley, Negative #: 95-3340


The altar of El Santuario de Chimayo whose color scheme and ornamentation could be seen as influential to “Dave’s Dream”

The long lines of automobiles produced in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s were reminicent of the long corrieras—adobe houses that were composed of several branches of a single family constructed through a series continuous additions as the family grew. The interiors and/or exteriors of the car were often lavishly ornamented, reminiscent of the baroque ornamentation found in the mud brick interiors.


Ruin of a corriera house in San Idelfono, New Mexico and a 1963 Impela.


Low-rider Cadillac named “Chimayo,” Chimayo, New Mexico, 1997 by Craig Varjabedian

Today, the mud brick village of Chimayo, New Mexico is considered the spiritual center of the lowrider world and nearby Española, New Mexico is considered the lowrider capital of the world. Today lowrider culture has become a global phenomena, but the ornate vehicles and over-zealous use of hydraulics that tilts the automobiles into torqued positions still recall the leaning ancient mud brick structures of northern New Mexico.

And while lowriding has become a serious artform and mud brick architecture has roots in the sacred, the combination of adobe architecture and the automobile has also been poked fun at in popular culture as evidenced by the adobe car, featured in a Saturday Night Live “fake commercial“, a transcript of which appears below:

Spokesman: These days, everyone’s talking about the Hyundai, and the Yugo. Both nice cars, if you’ve got $3,000 or $4,000 to throw around. But, for those of us whose name doesn’t happen to be Rockefeller, finally there’s some good news – a car with a sticker price of $179. That’s right, $179. The name of the car?

Adobe. The sassy new Mexican import that’s made out of clay. German engineering and Mexican know-how helped create the first car to break the $200 barrier. At this price, you might not expect more than reliable transportation – but, brother, you get it! Extra features: like the custom contour seats, or the beverage-gripping dash. And the money you save isn’t exactly small change!

Jingle:
“Hey, hey, we’re Adobe!
The little car that’s made out of clay!
We’re gonna save you some money
that you can spend in some other way!
Hey, hey, we’re Adobe!
Hey, hey, we’re Adobe!
Adobe!”

Spokesman: Adobe. You can buy a cheaper car. But I wouldn’t recommend it!

Announcer: Not approved for street use in some states. No warranty either expressed or implied. All sales final.

Interestingly, most major automobile manufacturers actually employ clay to visualize their designs before they go into production. This art of designing cars in clay has existed since the 1920’s, just as the Industrial Revolution was beginning to influence the culture of the remote villages of Northern New Mexico and still today, most of the futuristic prototypes found at car shows are clay models crafted with multiple axis computer controlled mills that carve the car from clay based on designs created using 3D modeling software.


High Speed CNC Machine

And as sophisticated machinery is being developed to shape the automobiles of the future out of clay, cumbersome vehicles exist that move across flat terrains, which consume mud and excrete large quantities of mud brick to fuel a growing demand for adobe houses in New Mexico and beyond. Such machinery can be found at The Adobe Factory in Alcalde, New Mexico and can produce 20,000 mud bricks per day.


An adobe machine

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Ancient Rammed Earth Observaory

Only recently rediscovered. An ancient site in the port of Qingdao has revealed the oldest known observatory in China. The Chinese Astronomy Society, learned of the finding at its annual convention. Experts point to historical evidence, that the Langya Observatory in east China’s Shandong Province, was built during the Warring States Period— more than 22-hundred years ago. The three-storey structure stands about nine meters. The original structure was made of rammed earth. The observatory was evidently erected as a site for studying the stars as well as for monitoring conditions at sea. [ Watch ]

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Clan Homes in Fujian

Clan homes in Fujian by Jens Aaberg-Jørgensen, originally published in Danish in ARKITEKTEN no. 28, November 2000, pp. 2–9, is an exceptional resource of photos, drawings and documentation of the round, rammed earth miniature circular castles, constructed from the 11th to 20th centuries that are shared by entire clans; their circular shapes, single point of entry, and weapons portholes were designed to optimize defense. As we reported previously, the structures were recently protected by UNESCO.


Photo Credit

[ via Core 77 ]

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Tolou added to UNESCO World Heritage List


Photo credit

Tulou, the unique rammed earth buildings of Fujian Province in southeastern China, were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List on Sunday, during the 32nd session of the World Heritage Committee. According to the submission provided by China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the Tulou buildings have been built since the 11th century. Designed to meet the requirements of a whole clan living together, they usually consist of a rammed earth outer wall and internal wooden framework, often of a circular configuration surrounding a central shrine.