Whoever travels in Laos can visit at some point Akha villages hosting surprising elevated little houses as you can see on the pictures. Those houses called “love huts”, are built by the village’s male teenagers in order for them to invite girls for a celebration of their young libidos.
As short as great article on Deconcrete entitled Suspended Bivouac Shelters…
Also see BLDG BLOG‘s last article about this strange Michigan triangle…
More articles very soon
Sociable Weavers are birds living in the Botswana desert (which is the site of Catherine Ingraham current seminar at Pratt) and they have the ability to build up amazing sophisticated nests on a given support. Not only those nests propose an interesting system of temperature regulation but they even host other species of birds that thus live in symbiosis with the weavers.
thanks Aurana !
If Hell is a place where fire never stops to burn, Centralia (Pennsylvania) might be this place…
Here is are some pictures from amazing growing root bridges in India. A beautiful application of Gille Deleuze’s mouvement en train de se faire describing Leibniz’s philosophy.Here is the little text on Living Root Bridges:
Fingal’s cave is situated on Staffa’s island in Scotland an its characteristics consist of presence of Basalt Organs. These basalt columns results from solidification and thermic contraction of a basalt stream a very short time after its emission. You can observe some of them in Island, Ireland, Scotland and France.
ville souterraine près de Tungkwan (Chine)
Exposition au MOMA (NY) en 1964 par Bernard Rudofsky sur l’architecture vernaculaire “autocréée” dont la fonction est la seule motivation pour exister. Si vous cherchez le livre (édition originale !), vous pouvez le trouver sur http://www.abebooks.com (6$+13$ de frais de port soit moins de 15€).
Anticoli dans les Sabines (près de Rome)
ville Dogon au sud de Tombouctou (Mali)
Marrakesh (Maroc)
This free material had already inspired some architects that desiged some cool pavillion for the Snow Show. I supposed that they were not part of the building team (if that ever happened) !
Another example of self-construction in Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects.Dwellings below, fields upstairs
One of self-construction’s motivation comes from the fact that it is difficult for the authority to control and thus, sometimes its illegal existence for a more or less important time. That is one of the topics tackled by Robert Neuwirth in his book, Shadow cities. A billion squatters, a new urban world. In fact, for his research, this author lived for a while in one of Rio’s favelas and other illegal district in Nairobi (Kenya), Mumbai (India) and Istanbul (Turkey). For each city, he is interested in observing how these districts’ inhabitants manage to negociate with their environment’s illegal existence thanks to a bypass or an interpretation of the law, which allow their juridical eviction to be more difficult. That is how we learn that, a Turkish law affirms that an illegal building in construction can be destroyed immediately whereas, an achieved building could only be demolished after judiciary proceedings. Therefore a lot of buildings are built very quickly during the night, to limitate as possible the vulnerability period. It is then interesting to observe how the bypass of law influence architecture and become a collective tacit knowledge which rules the district organisation.
Following you will find few pictures of self constructed houses builded with straw, most of time those buildings got a very poor architecturale quality…
But I think this building technics wich is, about sustainibility, thermic and cost specially , one of the most interesting, and it’s just at the beguinning of its reality as a real construction material, I hope that in the coming months/years we will see more experimetation with that material.
More over its really easy to find individuals sites following this kind of self construction initiatives.
By now the major probleme of that technic (straw bale+clay) is that needs a lot of handwork to apply the clay on the straw walls, so if your interested in building one in yourbackyard, you had better to have lot of enthousiastic friends or a big familly!
In Architecture without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky presents this example of a Pakistan city, Hyperabad Sind where a bunch of unique air-conditionners:
This month’s thematic would be about self-construction.
After this post about Tadashi Kawamata’s workshop in Versailles’ school of architecture, here is his own installation in La Maréchalerie. Like the students’ work, Kawamata uses crates and little plastic joints. In the inside, in order to create a new volume, crates are linked to a net hung by cables to Maréchalerie’s wooden beams.
While we are amazed by fancy shaped architectures, some other people are inventing clever devices with almost no money. Sistema Arde has been designed by Alejandro Villareal and Pedro Martinez to build in a cheap way self constructed low incomes houses in Mexico.Here is the text in Design like you give a damn:
Maintenant que la Tour Saint Jacques se soit progressivement déshabillée de son bel habit, c’est au tour du Palais du Sénat d’interroger malgré lui, le lien qu’entretient ce qu’on appelle le patrimoine avec une contemporanéité (excusez le barbarisme). L’hybridation ne durera qu’un instant, alors profitons-en !
Lorsque l’architecture s’autocréer, nous sommes tous au chomage technique mais c’est beau !
