Earth/Lands

Earth is an essentially original and misunderstood raw material with great potential, from the positive environmental and energy ratio, to its admirable capacity to integrate other materials such as stone, wood, brick, lime, vegetable fibres, etc., capable also of constituting the sole material for whole buildings in climactical and geographically extreme situations. Earth offers a great capacity to respond to the housing needs of millions of human beings, not only quantitative needs compatible with limited environmental harmony and resources, but also qualitative cultural requirements, as a result of its high cultural ‘plasticity’, its ability to change and adapt in response to changes in the natural and human environment, and to be an expressive language of identities and differing histories. With fresh attention to the environment we can return to earth building as a new technology for architecture in the twenty-first century.