ARCHITECTURE OF EARTH AND SHADE

Our earthen houses are upside-down caves in the sky.
Bozo saying – Mali

1 EARTHEN ARCHITECTURE By its very nature, architecture takes place between “sky” and “earth.” This is where it is located, making the earth itself one of its foundational, physical, but also meta-physical poles: conceptual and symbolic. If the original shelter (dwelling) – the first of the archai – was in the beginning a chance refuge in the shape of a crevasse, a cave, or, finally, a manmade excavation of the basic material of the world, the dirt of the ground, once this has the possibility of taking concrete form as a construction, that is to say a voluntary action of technique and idea whose purpose is the intentional, deliberate creation of a shelter built to last, it is in the earth and with earth that architecture naturally finds the designated material for its realization, simulating the primeval shelter as a manmade, outward-projecting artifact: turned upside-down towards the sky, towards the outside open to being adapted by purposeful shaping. Material here and now, the mother-material only now conquered as foundation and rootedness, as adherence and stability, condensation, and innerness, which purposely used and molded together with water, straw, and sun – techne, the second arche – generates the unprecedented physical figure of the “room,” the primordial house, in total organic continuity with the earth from which it comes and which truly now becomes a structured place, really becomes a dwelling. […]