A Short History of Earthen Architecture

Earth is one of mankind’s oldest building materials. Changes in how people provided food for themselves, specifically the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to a more settled way of life entailing agriculture and raising livestock, resulted in the need for permanent housing. Depending on the local climate and vegetation, earth was also used as a building material, along with natural stone. The oldest surviving fragments of structures built using earthen building techniques are located in the Near East. They include Jericho and sites in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) built about 10,000 years ago, and the 8,000-year-old structures made of air-dried clay bricks in Çatal Höyük in Anatolia, Turkey.

With the proliferation of industrially manufactured materials such as concrete, brick, and steel, earthen architecture gradually lost its importance and in European countries, especially, has increasingly been forgotten. In recent years, however, rising demand for ecological building materials has assured earthen architecture of a comeback.

Today, about 30 percent of residential buildings worldwide are built with earth or loam. Almost 100 of the over 500 monuments on UNESCO’s 2004 list of World Heritage sites were built partially or wholly out of loam.

Some well-known examples are the Great Wall of China, the loam “high-rises” in Shibam, and the Alhambra in Granada. Central Europe also has an important tradition of earthen architecture, despite its rather cold and rainy climate.

The following panels review some of the key stages in the history of civilization through to the merging of two distinct building cultures in Brazil and the renaissance and dissemination of earthen architecture in Central Europe.