Page 20 RAIN July/August 1984 mud. Ordinary buildings are extraordinary works of art. In wetter climates, mud forms the ground on which the people apply more rain- and wear- resistant materials: manure plaster for walls, and water in which dawadawa pods have been soaked for the floors. Just yesterday, I was once again reminded of my own deep, personal relationship with mud as I mucked about with the compost pile in my garden. Mud, the base of my garden. The basis of all life? After all, what is “primordial ooze" but a fancy word for mud? —JS I’ve always liked the idea of using earth for building. What other material is as widely available, cheap, and amenable to creative uses? About one-third of the people in the world use earth for structures ranging from subsistence housing (see Mud, Mud: The Potential of Earth-Based Material for Third World Housing, RAIN VIII:4) to monumental mosques and minarets. Recent interest in energy conservation and vernacular architecture around the loorld has sparked a revival of earth-building traditions. —TK Racing Alone: Houses Made with Earth and Fire, by Nader Khalili, 1983, 256 pp., $14.95 from: Harper & Row 10 East 53rd Street New York, NY 10022 Nader Khalili, a native Iranian who has studied and practiced architecture in the U.S. and Iran, tells the story of his search for a method of constructing cheap, durable houses using local materials and local skills in Racing Alone. Although he was at first inspired by the beauty and simplicity of earth and earth forms, Khalili found new inspiration when, after an earthquake hit a village in Iran, he saw the buildings that survived the quake best were the indigenous domed structures built of unbaked earth, and the ones that collapsed most dangerously were the flat, tin-roofed concrete structures, products of Western technology. Khalili found grudging acceptance, at best, for his backward-seeming ideas of building with earth in Iran. Only half the task was finding a way to build quake- proof, rainproof, sturdy, beautiful houses of earth. Much of Khalili's work took place while the revolution was fermenting in Iran, and he was frustrated again and again by Iran's forward-looking yet tradition-bound culture: “Here [in Iran] lies a wealth of clay culture that I need to touch, and over there [in the U.S.] lies a wealth of ease to work on dreams. Here, if your dream lies anything beyond the writing of poetry you are heading for a state of desperation." A flash of insight finally came when Courtyard kitchen in southern Ghana Khalili espied an ancient kiln in the countryside, still standing after many a rainstorm. Here was the answer to his dreams: “The pictures of all the ceramic kilns of Korea, China, Japan and now Iran come to mind. All these poor people living in these lands with the most sophisticated kiln rooms, stronger than any building they build, without living in them. They live right next to the kiln, in flimsy, dirty, and unstable houses that would fall apart with the first serious rain, and a harsh wind, a small flood, or a little tremor; while their strong, long- lived kiln rooms look at them in mocking silence. They keep wasting all that fuel in mindlessly firing and refiring, baking and rebaking their kilns, all along watching their living quarters collapse while their kilns survive." Ironically, what these people bake in their kilns are the bricks they use to build their houses (as well as the pottery that they use for eating, cooking, and storage). Khalili convinced a master kiln builder to fire ceramic houses for him, and he discovered a way to glaze the interior walls. "I have always imagined my glazed houses to have the color and textures, the soft and curved edges around the openings and projections, that seashells have. I can imagine a human walking, sitting, and living in the glazed space like one of those sea animals crawling into its shell." He took great care to use indigenous materials and local skills. The firing and glazing process itself—called Geltaftan— uses only earth, air, fire, and water. To apply the glazing, Khalili didn't want to use imported pumps, nozzles, and generators. "Geltaftan must be a system that could be used anywhere, even in the farthest and poorest village . . . and should not even consider such luxuries as electricity, let alone use machinery and technicians." The solution was to use insecticide sprayers, which work with a bicycle pump—all the farmers have one, and "they use it almost as often as they use their shovels." (By the way, he does not discuss the health effects of using insecticide-permeated containers to spray glazing inside the houses.) Racing Alone is about holding onto dreams and discovering wonder in the world: "Now the time has come to create a ceramic glaze, a stoneware, a china, a stoneware, not in the scale of our hands, but in the scale of our lives." —TK Egyptian villa, built 1980 (FROM: Down to Earth) CHRISTINE BASTIN
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