July/August 1984 RAIN Page 21 View down a side street in Djenne, Mali A 19th century German depiction of the use of unbaked earth in traditional rural buildings (FROM: Down to Earth) Architecture and Community: Building in the Islamic World Today, edited by Renata Holod and Dari Rastorfer, 1983, 256 pp., $20 from: Aperture Elm Street Millerton, NY 12546 The 15 projects in this book are winners of the first Aga Khan Award for Architecture, which was set up to encourage high architectural standards and a new synthesis between indigenous forms and modernity in Muslim counties. The awards recognize not celebrated monuments, but “the part of the common man creating for himself and his neighbors a setting for life and for health, preserving and utilizing what nature has created, developing ways to maintain his identity rather than accepting the elephantine massiveness of today's world," The book itself is beautifully designed and contains numerous photographs of each project. The projects convey a sense of human scale, of adaptation to local needs, and of the beauty of traditional idioms in architecture. Ten essays in the first part of the book discuss various aspects of Islamic architecture, philosophy, and life. The book "calls for the reawakening of concern for the efficacious, the appropriate, and the beautiful in the architecture of the Islamic world today," writes Renata Holod in her introduction. Categories for the Aga Khan Award were: social premises for future architectural development, search for consistency within historical context, search for preservation of traditional heritage, restoration, search for contemporary use of traditional language, search for innovation, and search for appropriate building systems. Beautiful color and black-and- white photos illustrate each project, accompanied by descriptive text that briefly summarizes the project's context and intent. The award committee presented a special award to Hassan Fathy, the Egyptian architect who, since 1947, has been designing and building the city of New Gourna. He has long been a champion of vernacular architecture and mud- brick construction (see Architecture for the Poor, RAIN 1:9). For New Gourna, he "identified the best preindustrial building systems of Egypt and strove to understand their climatic efficiency, to appreciate their aesthetic, and to extend their performance limits." Elements of these buildings included ventilated two-story halls, screens, courtyards, vaults built without scaffolding, and domes on squinches built over square rooms and laid in a continuing spiral. In Architecture and Community, Fathy writes about musicality, spirituality, and civility in building and about the human harmony with nature, materials, and tradition. He writes, "In the ideal architecture, modelled by craftsmen, by artisans, man would be putting something of himself into the material and radiating something, giving it something that, along wjth the essence of the material, would be reradiated to man, and would be doing him good. The principle of accretion allows for the constant interaction of man and material and environment. To my mind, architecture is like the shell of a snail, the soft part secreting calcium carbonates and by natural forces making the form by movement and surface tension. The [carbonate] grains would arrange themselves in a village, returning on the soft, living part that created it and gave it form." —TK Down to Earth—Adobe Architecture: an old idea, a new future, by Jean Dethier, 1983,192 pp., $12.95 from: Facts on File 460 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Down to Earth, too, focuses on earth buildings in the arid regions of Africa and the Middle East—that's where most of them are—but also includes earth buildings in Norway, Colombia, Nepal, England, China, and the American Southwest. The book is based on the exhibition "Des Architectures de Terre," which opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1981 and subsequently went on tour to museums worldwide. Hundreds of photos, in black-and- white and color, demonstrate that earth architecture is a living, centuries-old tradition amenable to a wide range of architectural forms. The author, Jean Dethier, points out that although the skills involved in building with earth originated almost 10,000 years ago, earth architecture has immense potential today because with it we can build energy-efficient structures, suited to the local climate, that use local resources. The photos aren't as visually stunning as the ones in Spectacular Vernacular (RAIN X:3), but the range of building traditions catalogued makes up for that. —TK COURTESY L. CHRISTIANS
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