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Amidst the mountain tops of the Asir region in the far south-west of Saudi Arabia lies the town of Abha. The place is green and a good ten degrees cooler than the desert, only half an hour’s drive below. The air is clean and pure and from your lofty foothold you frequently face fantastic thunderstorms […]
October 3, 2010
In the 1940’s Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy attempted to start an architectural revolution. Soon after dedicating himself to rural or ‘peasant’ architecture and starting work with the Nubian Vault roofing and mud brick building techniques, Fathy took on the enormous and not-so envious task of re-locating the inhabitants of the village ‘Gourna’, near Luxor in […]
April 6, 2010
Another talk on Djenne, this time by Charlotte Joy, an anthropologist at Cambridge, offering something quite different to the architectural perspective I have occupied so far. The many talks I have been to invariably open with an introduction on Mali, where it is etc, as one tends to to avoid any presumption of knowledge. Immediately […]
April 1, 2010
This website is a great resource for information on ‘earth architecture’ in both traditional and contemporary applications: http://www.eartharchitecture.org/
March 21, 2010
When analysing mud building, the fact that the construction footprint (including transport of materials) is little bigger than the footprint of the site itself is surely the pinnacle of sustainable construction. In Djenné the buildings are predominantly flat roofed, wooden beams spanning the mud walls, covered with mud. With the source of wood being the […]
March 20, 2010
Djenné (jen-nay) is a settlement in the West African country of Mali. Situated on the river Niger, which provides both life and constraints. Every year the river floods, something that is an integral part of the town’s yearly eco-cycle. Djenné is positioned in such a way that when the river does flood it becomes almost […]
March 3, 2010
Last night I attended a talk by Paul Oliver at the RIBA that is part of the most exciting talk series I have seen there for a long time; The Art of Mud Building. The talk, ‘Down to Earth’, was quite general, a kind of overview, mainly based around West African countries and the information […]
Occasionally Architectural 
December 19, 2010
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