The Canelo Project, a family ranch in Sonoita, Arizona, uses the most basic of resources, dirt and straw, to build houses. Bill and Athena Steen, the husband and wife team that founded the project in 1989, use strawbales as the building blocks for their homes. They stitch together the bales, and plaster them with a … Read more
The ancient Arabian city of AlUla had been uninhabited since the 1980s, abandoned when a new town center was established nearby. Here, hundreds of mud-brick houses, huddled around a tenth-century fortress. The old town is now being restored as a cultural district. A void, formed from the remnants of two former houses, was known locally … Read more
At 76, Graham Liney is the quintessential jack-of-trades. He has bred potatoes, run restaurants, travelled the world, worked in television, and built his own house in Australia. He came to Australia in 1969 as an art student from England, and three years later he stumbled across Willow Vale Mill, a 1830s flour mill in New … Read more
Barn raising has long served as a cultural way to extol virtues of mutual aid and premodern communitarianism, a symbolic reference for an event where neighbors come together to build together. But instead of an origin story of American pastoralism or a romanticized view of country life, barn raising is more instructive as a collective … Read more
The archeological site of Mezhyrich, located in central Ukraine, is home to four remarkable mammoth bone structures. Ranging from 12 to 24 m2 (130 to 260 sf), they were intricately constructed using hundreds of mammoth bones and tusks. An analysis of small mammal remains recovered directly from the archaeological layers indicates that at least one … Read more
Mr. Giovane has enclosed an entire condominium in Brazil with a dry-stacked stone wall. He has worked with this method for decades. It took him about six months of work, but he stayed on site for almost a year because of the rainy weather. These walls are made without the use of any binding material, … Read more