I’m fascinated by how we build our houses and how living within them shapes our perception of the world. Building your own home is unattainable for most people in the West today, and if you find a way to get into debt for the rest of your life, you want to build for eternity. This pursuit of permanence above all else may be one of the quiet forces that has led us into systems that exhaust both the human spirit and the planet. We need new visions for how to build.
What we call dirt is, in fact, one of the most widely used building materials on Earth. Earthen architecture stands as a prime example of sustainability, slowly re-emerging as an alternative to concrete. When such a house disintegrates, it can become a home again simply by adding water — nothing short of magic, a truly circular material logic.
Like the living beings that are reflected in their soft curves, these buildings require continual care. They are embodied vessels of ancestral knowledge, that can only be kept alive through active participation. Therefore, many of the structures created by once-thriving civilizations have already returned to the ground — unlike the stone monuments through which other cultures are remembered.
I am still curious why West Africa’s adobe buildings receive so little serious consideration. If architecture is a cultural expression, perhaps it is the culture from which these buildings have evolved, so alien to the European mind, that keeps it in the academic wilderness, hard for the commentators to place.James Morris
All photographs taken from from the book
‘Butabu: Adobe Architecture of West Africa’ by James Morris and Susan Preston Blier
© 2003, used with Permission from Chronicle Books LLC, San Francisco.
