Juan Salamanca Balen - SALBA estudio   Colombia   Located 20 kilometers to the north of the municipality of Uribia, in Colombia’s La Guajira department, this school for the indigenous Wayuu community is immersed in a desert landscape. The project seeks to reflect the pillars of the organization behi

IAAC   Spain   The Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and the Italian company WASP (World’s Advanced Saving Project), which specializes in 3D printers, present TOVA, a prototype built with earth and a Crane WASP over a period of seven weeks on t

Foster + Partners   France   Located close to the Canal de la Robine, a museum rises like a temple consecrated to the Roman heritage of a city which was an important node in the network of roads of Gaul. The main spaces are organized in a single level on a plinth, under the prot

Oualalou + Choi   United Arab Emirates   The Moroccan contribution to the next World Expo seeks to demonstrate how traditional construction systems have the potential to give rise to more sustainable development models. The world’s largest facade of rammed earth encompasses twenty-two recta

Renzo Piano   Uganda   On the shore of Lake Victoria, a pediatric hospital seeks to provide medical care to young residents of the area while serving as a center for the training of local physicians and nurses. Equipped with three operating rooms and eighty beds, the hospi

Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   A group of modular pavilions houses an educational center that provides high school graduates in the country’s third most populous city with the opportunity to obtain further studies. The location being a flood plain, landscaping work was needed to p

Gradolí & Sanz arquitectes   Spain   The building lies on the edge of the Valterna residential area, on a stretch of land located between the dwellings and the En Dolça ravine, which separates Valterna from the expansion area of La Pinada, of the same property as the school. The first d

Tatiana Bilbao   Mexico   Built with compacted earth, the hotel blends with the landscape and includes a set of amenities inspired by the ruins and by classical architecture; villas born form interconnected cubes that rotate on their axis; and hotel rooms that are pure cubes

Mario Cucinella Architects   Italy   A fruit of the collaboration between Mario Cucinella Arquitectos – based in Bologna and New York – and WASP (World’s Advanced Saving Project), the Italian company specialized in 3D printing, this circular housing prototype made of soil is located in

Mínimo Común Arquitectura   Paraguay   Located in the middle of farmland in Curuguaty, a city in the Canindeyú Department of Paraguay, 350 kilometers from the capital, Asunción, this 200-square-meter office building by the local firm Mínimo Común Arquitectura rises on a platform, set 1.5

Sharon Davis Design   Nepal   The New York practice of Sharon Davis worked with the NGO Possible Health and the Nepalese government in raising new medical facilities in Achham, one of Nepal’s poorest and most remote regions. Surrounded by mountains in the Seti River Valley, the c

Dellekamp Arquitectos   Mexico   Conceived as a refuge, the Cabo House stands on a series of platforms built with local earth that descend adapting to the slope of the site. From these telluric platforms, walls of the same material, rammed earth, rise in parallels to frame views tow

David Chipperfield   Sudan   The excavation site of Naga is one of the largest in Sudan, containing the ruins of what was one of the religious centers of the ancient Kingdom of Kush. Located some 50 kilometers to the east of the Nile River, and a three-hour drive from Khartoum,

DnA_Design and Architecture   China   Dedicated to Wang Jing – an imperial scholar of the Ming Dynasty who was chief editor of the Yongle Encyclopedia –, the memorial hall is inserted into the traditional town center of Wang village, which is quite run-down and threatened by neglect and

tres birds workshop   United States   This residence of 650m² was built using 200 tons of rammed earth colored with pigments from the region, and compressed into 75cm-thick walls that provide great thermal inertia to favor energy saving. Four geothermal wells were also installed for this

SoPA (Social Practice Architecture)   Tanzania   The project was built using mainly two materials: soil excavated from the site and locally collected wood. It was completed in a period of four months, with the participation of the people of Kibaoni as well as international collaborators... [+]

De Gouden Liniaal Architecten   Belgium   The tower goes up in a former gravel extraction area now converted into the nature reserve of RivierPark Maasvallei. The outer walls were built with local materials – 20% gravel, 40% ocher-colored earth, and 40% clay, stabilized with trass – in seven

FabriKG   Mexico   To protect the building from floods during the hurricane season, the structure rises 1.2m with a concrete plinth on which the rammed earth walls rest. In this way the complex seems to emerge from the ground itself in the middle of a palm grove... [+]

Studio Octopi   United Kingdom   Around the pool of water is an inscription of text from the Magna Carta, and this is the only literal allusion in a monument of abstract forms built with rammed earth and illuminated by a powerful overhead oculus. 

Foster + Partners   France   Known for its rich historic and artistic heritage, Narbonne, founded by Romans in 118 BC, was once a major port. Today it is a vibrant city, with an impressive legacy of buildings, ancient relics, and archaeological sites. At the gates of the city, n

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Sudan   In a semi-desert landscape between the Nile and Atbara rivers, the remains of the city of the Kushites in Meroe – a powerful dynasty that reigned from the 8th century BC to the 4th century AD – were declared a UNESCO Heritage Site in 2011. Located ab

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   The success of the primary school in Gando and its positive impact on the community encouraged to build a secondary school to offer opportunities to those students who wanted to continue their studies. Inspired in the distribution of the surrounding

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   Developed to establish an exchange between local craftsmen, builders, architects, students, and visitors, Atelier Gando was initiated under the organization of Francis Kéré with the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio in Switzerland. The Atelier w

A philosopher who loved architecture, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, wrote in the year 1822 that making holes in the earth was perhaps more natural than raising poles or pillars on the surface, and that it perhaps made much more sense to think of the

In the village of Rudrapur, located in the Dinajpur Disrtict of northern Bangladesh, the German architect Anna Heringer – in conjunction with Veronika Lang and the non-profit organization Dipshikha – recently completed a therapy center for people wit

Fernando Vela Cossío   Earth has been the quintessential building material of farming people. Thanks to its being so extraordinarily available and cheap, combined with its bioclimatic performance and its capacity to blend into the environment, raw earth has been a constant

One of the main challenges of building with earth today is that of transforming its artisanal character, and begin using it in industrialized building processes. Such was the goal pursued, for instance, in the design and construction of the Gugler P

Luis Maldonado   Compressed Earth Block (CEB) is a building material that is habitually used to raise walls using conventional construction techniques. It can come it different sizes, but the most common one is 15x15x30 centimeters. The most unusual aspect of the CEB

Luis Maldonado   Thanks to its environmental benefits and also to its aesthetic qualities, the different techniques applied to construction with mud still have a future in architecture. 

Diébédo Francis Kéré está construyendo una biblioteca pública en la aldea burkinesa de Gando, en la que el arquitecto afincado en Berlín nació hace 47 años: un nuevo edificio que se añade a los dos —aulario y residencia de profesores— que componen la

El centro de formación de Chwiter, situado en las afueras de Marrakech y diseñado por Anna Heringer, Martin Rauch, Elmar Nägele, Ernst Waibel y Salima Naji, tiene como objetivo ofrecer a los jóvenes formación profesional. En este contexto, la constr

El estudio coruñés Vier, que agrupa a los arquitectos Antonio Raya, Cristóbal Crespo, Santiago Sánchez y Enrique Antelo, firma la piscina cubierta municipal en Toro, Zamora, un equipamiento que cuenta con la singularidad de que sus muros exteriores

Anna Heringer Lindsay Blair Howe Martin Rauch   Material, Process, Catalyst