BOOK REVIEW

The Art of Earth Architecture

PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE

by Jean Dethier. THAMES AND HUDSON 2020

A look into inspirational earth architecture worldwide

BY MIN HALL

It is timely that the publication of The Art of Earth Architecture: Past

Present and Future coincides with that of the reinvigorated New Zealand Earth Building Standards. Not only do Kiwis have access to a comprehensive and inspirational work celebrating unfired earthen architecture worldwide, but also to New Zealand specific standards spelling out how to design and build them.

In 1981, Belgian-born architect Jean Dethier curated the exhibition Down to Earth – Mud Architecture: an old idea, a new future, at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The exhibition, and its modest companion text of the same name, celebrated earth architecture and enthusiastically promoted its potential in the face of an environmental crisis. Forty years on, The Art of Earth Architecture (TAEA) takes up these themes with renewed vigour, and considerable success. In this substantial and superbly illustrated volume, Dethier and his contributing authors seek to remedy the “collective amnesia” that has - until now - left the global history of raw earth architecture largely unwritten, despite the increased interest in vernacular architecture since the 1960s. They seek also to provoke, to question why one of the most extensively used building materials in the world has been disregarded for so long, especially when architects are looking for materials to combat climate change. The book is structured chronologically and thematically, with each chapter featuring a number of essays, together with an “Earth Architecture Gallery” of drawings and photographs of buildings, landforms, artefacts, and art. The early chapters introduce earth as a construction material and its early use. Chapter four, “Vernacular Heritage,” includes essays and a plethora of tantalising photographs and drawings covering not only age-old traditions but also their contemporary revival for heritage restoration projects, and for rebuilding after natural and man-made disasters.

PHOTO, OPPOSITE PAGE In 2014, in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, architect Luigi Rosselli built a compact group of twelve small lodges, covering an area of 575 square meters and intended to provide accommodation for shepherds. A 230-metrelong load-bearing wall was built on this formerly virgin landscape, using rammed earth. Its undulations help individualize the houses. The houses’ flat roofs are covered with a thick layer of soil planted with vegetation, in order to provide thermal protection from the subtropical climate. In 2017, this design won a TERRA Award.

© Luigi Rosselli Architects

PHOTO, LEFT A spectacular rammed earth wall at the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre in Osoyoos, Canada, which exudes monumental grandeur. Built in 2006 by Sirewall for the architecture studio DIALOG, it attracted international attention for its multicoloured horizontal layers. It also created fierce controversy, however, on cultural, ethical and technical grounds, because its innovative aesthetic effects were created with aid of industrial additives: the earth used for the wall was heavily stabilized with cement, and its colours were achieved by adding artificial pigments.

PHOTO, RIGHT - Earth samples collected by the Auroville Earth Institute, India

© Satprem Maïni (Auroville Earth Institute)

PHOTO, BELOW - The Art of Earth Architecture book cover.

The wider theme of modernising earth architecture is addressed directly in chapter five. This covers the period 1789-1968—an era bookended by two revolutions, and two “great pioneers of modern earth architecture”: French architect François Cointeraux (17401830), and Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900-1989). Cointeraux, seeking an economical building method that would enable the democratisation of rural society after the French Revolution, modernised the ancient technique of rammed earth by using moveable wooden formwork. He founded schools of rural architecture in Paris, Lyon and Grenoble, and his texts were disseminated throughout the Western world. Fathy sought to revive the ancient vernacular tradition of building with raw earth bricks, most famously for the village of New Gourna (1948), a resettlement project for people soon to be displaced by the building of the Aswan Dam. The chapter concludes with discussion and work from the counter-culture revolution emerging out of the oil crisis in the 1960s. The penultimate chapter covers the next fifty years, with essays on important contributors to the development of modern earth architecture: the founders of CRAterre, established in France in 1979; Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, working in China since 1997; and Francis Kéré, in Burkino Faso from 2001. The accompanying Earth Architecture Gallery uses a typological framework and showcases inspirational work that will be familiar to many—as well as much that is not so well known. Curiously, there is no mention of the important work of Nader Khalili, the Iranian architect.

FOOT NOTE 1 Dethier, J. “Down to Earth” (1981), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 2 Kick-started by the 1964 exhibition “Architecture without Architects” at MOMA, New York, curated by Bernard Rudofsky. 3 CRAterre, founded by Patrice Doat, Hugo Houben and Hubert Guillard in 1979, is a research laboratory of the National

School of Architecture of Grenoble, France. 4 Khalili, N. “Ceramic Houses,”(1986), Harper and Row, SanFancisco. 5 TAEA Gasnier p.478 6 TAEA Guillard p.154

AUTHOR BIO Min Hall holds a MArch degree from Victoria University of Wellington, is a Registered Architect, Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Architects, and lecturer at Unitec Institute of Technology. She has thirty years’ experience in architectural practice, has received fourteen NZIA awards for built projects, and her work has been published in national magazines. She is a member of the New Zealand Earth Building Standards committee, has authored book chapters and conference papers, and current research areas are the history of earth building in Aotearoa New Zealand and prefabrication techniques for bio-based materials, specifically timber and straw.

PHOTO, ABOVE - The master builder El Hadji Falké Barmou, winner of the 1986 Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the Yaama Mosque, built in 1982 in the region of Tahoua, Niger.

© Aga Khan Trust for Culture / Kamran Adle (photo)

PHOTO, RIGHT The artist Silla Camara adds mural decorations to a house in the village of Djajibinni in Mauritania, ca. 1985

© Margaret Courtney-Clarke