Vernacular Buildings in Kashmir

A group of engineers visited a remote mountain village tucked deep into Kashmir’s rural land. They came hoping to learn from what they found, and what they first noticed was an old, broken mud house, abandoned and half-swallowed by wild grass. The roof had caved in. Wooden beams, once solid and proud, were now warped … Read more

Natural Building Engineer, Anthony Dente, Talks About His Work

Anthony Dente is a licensed engineer and principal at Verdant Structural Engineers and Verdant Building Products and is the vice president of the Cob Research Institute, where he is committed to appropriate material use for all structural building systems. Anthony graduated from the Architectural Engineering program at Penn State University and moved to Berkeley, CA … Read more

Students Learn How to Repair Adobe Buildings in New Mexico.

Eleven graduate students in the Historic Preservation program at the Pratt Institute of New York spent their Spring Break shoveling soil, straw, and sand into wheelbarrows, mixing buckets of lime plaster, and applying  limewash on historic walls as part of an Adobe Preservation Workshop in Mesilla, NM. They were assisted by Adobe in Action, a … Read more

Renovating a Crumbling Stone Home in Italy

After buying an old, rundown stone house in Italy, architect couple Maddalena Cerruti and Vincent Baisnée set about transforming it into the ultimate sustainable home. Renovating the building from scratch, room by room, they used natural and locally sourced materials to turn the crumbling structure into a property that respects their health, the environment and the building’s … Read more

A Sculpted Cob House in Kazakhstan

Inspired by desert dunes and ocean waves, this earthen home in Kazakhstan is a self-built eco dream, seemingly straight out of a fantasy novel, but this surrealist cob house is far from fiction. “When people first encounter our house, they struggle to believe it’s a residence,” says Dilyara Mazhitova. “Most assume it’s a public space … Read more