Federico Colella | Re:lab   Mexico   The Pan-American Development Foundation of Mexico proposed to refurbish the sports center of Xoxocotla Municipality, which was structurally damaged by the 2017 earthquake, and to build a new community center for the town. The work was carried out thr

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

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

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   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

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

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

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

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. 

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

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