Urbanitree   Cameroon   In Soa – near Yaundé, Cameroon’s capital – rises a new school designed by the architects Vicente Guallart and Danié Ibáñez, partners in the firm Urbanitree. An initiative of the Missionary Daughters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, it implements an ed

Adjaye Associates   Ghana   Ghana will be home to West Africa’s first facility specialized in children’s cancer. Commissioned by the Wish4Life Foundation, this ambitious project aims to transform children’s cancer treatment in the region. Perched on the eastern slope of the Ate

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   The tower, measuring eight meters tall, functions as viewing deck, exhibition space, and furnace. Timber boards are added to the pre-stressed pieces of adobe and steel that form the walls to make their transportation easier in case of disassembly...

Carlo Ratti   Italy   CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati was commissioned to design Quisimangia (Here we eat), a dining hall for employees of Mutti, a leading firm for tomato-based products. The location is Montechiarugolo, in the province of Parma, and the premises stand out for

MASS Design Group    Rwanda   Located in the village of Gashora, in the Bugesera district of eastern Rwanda, this educational campus is devoted to conservation agriculture, a sustainable field that seeks to increase the productivity and resilience of the agrarian system while pro

Déchelette Architecture   France   A building intended for social housing presents toward the street an innovative self-supporting screen of tamped earth, in contrast with the wooden facade behind. Like the wooden structure, the blocks of earth came prefabricated and were simply stack

Estudio Flume   Brazil   In Sumaúma Village, 35 kilometers from the nearest urban core, the municipality of Vitória do Mearim, in the state of Maranhão, Brazil, is this workspace for babassu coconut harvesters, a project of Estudio Flume, the São Paulo practice of Noelia Mon

Leopold Banchini Architects Sana Nabaha   Morocco   Two parallel walls of rammed earth form a linear succession that forms a rural house in Al Haouz, Morocco. Redefining the traditional house-courtyard typology, Dar El Farina breaks up its sequenced domestic spaces by means of pivot doors. The sun shi

munarq   Spain   This project builds on the resources available in the area. A specific type of soil defined by its excellent cohesive capacity is used to build all the walls. So the building is raised with local materials and techniques, incorporating the traditiona

Nordest arquitectura   Spain   The project takes off from the idea of building two homes for a family in Rupiá, a municipality in the Baix Empordà region of Girona province. Combining bioclimatic, functional, and integration arguments, the intervention analyzes the relationship be

Assemble BC Architects & Studies   France   Le Magasin Électrique is part of a complex previously used for the construction and maintenance of trains, built in the mid-19th century, and now harboring the Luma Arles art center. The revamp begin in 2013 and gave rise to the Frank Gehry-designed

MONO Architekten    Germany   This ensemble of constructions with perforated facades made of sedimentary layers of red-tinted rammed earth is situated in the city of Neuenburg am Rhein, close to the German, French, and Swiss borders. Connecting the urban center to the green zones

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   The Barcelona practice of Marta Peris and José Manuel Toral was commissioned by the Balearic Housing Institute (IBAVI) to build this residential complex in Ibiza. It is designed to get the best in terms of sunlight and sea views as well as to harness

Taller Héctor Barroso   Mexico   One of the open tournaments of the professional tennis circuit is held on premises where the facilities, presenting a simple wall of rammed earth, blend with the desert landscape. A series of platforms molds the terrain to form playing courts, which

Edra arquitectura km0 - Àngels Castellarnau Visús bunyesc arquitectes   Spain   The Huesca firm Edra Arquitectura km0 – led by the architect Ángels Castellarau – and Josep Bunyesces are the authors of this project in Parc del Falgar, a parkland in the Barcelona municipality of Franqueses de Vallés. Different uses – administratio

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   To ensure proper shear transfer in the horizontal joints, the rammed earth walls are provided with a vertical post-tensioning system of steel cables. This can be re-tensioned to compensate for settlements of the rammed earth...

Régis Roudil    France   Commissioned by the Présidence de la République, this daycare for 24 children is located at the heart of the Palais de l’Alma in Paris, within the monumental complex. Built with timber and rammed earth, it stands in the garden behind the 19th-century

David Chipperfield Architects   Greece   David Chipperfield Architects Berlin has won the contest to revamp and enlarge the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, located in the capital's Exarcheia neighborhood, which possesses one of the world's major collections of prehistoric and anci

Equipo 01 / Jesús San Vicente   Spain   FITUR, the annual International Tourism Fair held at Madrid’s IFEMA trade exhibition premises, takes place this year from 18 to 22 January. The pavilion designed by Equipo 01 / Jesús San Vicente for Paradores Nacionales is getting the FITUR Best Stan

Atelier Masomi    Niger   In rural Niger, markets run on a weekly basis, but the fast demographic growth of the remote village of Dandaji led to building of a new marketplace for daily shopping, on the original site around the ancestral tree villagers have always gathered at.

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

Invisible Studio   United Kingdom   In the vegetable garden of The Newt – a hotel in Bruton, a town in the southwest English county of Somerset – stands this building by Invisible Studio. This is the third that the British architecture group founded by Piers Taylor has completed for th

Kéré Architecture   Senegal   For the very first time in the history of the prestigious German institution, one of its centers scattered all over the world will occupy a building expressly designed for the purpose. Rising behind a wall that keeps out traffic noise, the building e

With its 130 million inhabitants, Mexico is the tenth most populated nation in the world, and among Spanish-speaking countries the one with most demographic weight. Add to this its strategic position, its important economy, and its powerful culture,

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.