Francis Diébédo Kéré extended the primary school in the village of Gando, Burkina Faso
While seemingly simple, "clay is one of the cornerstones of architectural practice," the Pritzker Prize committee says. "Poor, often forgotten or neglected, these techniques that use clay provide a narrative in which architecture becomes an enduring source of happiness and joy," the jury adds.
Working for marginalized communities
By naming Diébédo Kéré as this year’s laureate, the jury is not only recognizing a heritage, but above all, the unique journey of a man "of the earth.” The architect began building for his native village, Gando, in Burkina Faso: from clay, he built housing for teachers, a library, a women's center, a high school, and a workshop for training in construction techniques.
Elsewhere in Burkina Faso, but also in Mali, Togo, Sudan, Kenya, Mozambique and Benin, he developed other projects: all of them reflect the same ethic, that of working to increase the well-being of communities by combining technical knowledge, acquired in Germany, sustainable resources and local traditions.
"I wanted to enrich, to donate to the African continent, so I started with my own community," he recalled.
It's all about chemistry: earth and water are transformed by fire or the sun into a highly sustainable resource. From a basic element like mud, we get an eternal material produced by humans. UNESCO's website points out that one third of humankind lives in such housing.
Its cultural importance throughout the world is evident and has led to its consideration as a common heritage of humankind, therefore deserving protection and conservation by the international community. In 2011, over 10% of the World Heritage properties incorporate earthen structures. The availability and economic quality of the material mean it bears great potential to contribute to poverty alleviation and sustainable development.
These techniques, many thousands of years old, have outlasted others.
Eternal constructions
This brings to mind the Tower of Babel – the Old Testament tells of its brick-built construction – but also the first cities like Uruk, in Mesopotamia, founded 6,000 years ago, the Baths of Caracalla in Rome or the Great Wall of China. Later, mud was used to build the old walled city of Shibam,in Yemen, given the nickname "the Manhattan of the desert" or the Great Mosque of Djenne, in Mali, made out of clay.
This architecture, mainly associated with underdeveloped countries, was widespread throughout urban and rural Europe, until the 20th century: among the French rural housing built before 1914, and still standing, 15% are made from this material. Palaces, fortifications, entire cities, mosques, cultural landscapes and archeological sites constructed in raw clay are still standing nowadays.
Fighting preconceptions
“People reject clay because it is perceived as poor. I had to fight against these preconceptions, to make people accept that it can contribute to our growing needs in terms of housing and buildings," says Diébédo Kéré. "Clay is perfectly well adapted, just as reliable as other expensive materials. Earth has the same durability as concrete: it does not crack, although constantly in the sun, and resists the harsh weather conditions as well as the rain. Demand is there."
He shares a local anecdote: fortified with natural and vegetable extracts, the earthen walls are built without any chemical products. According to custom, if the gecko (lizard) does not enter the house, then it is not a good house.
The honesty of brick
Although it is no longer fully appreciated, earthen architecture, including brick, has all the qualities needed: aesthetic, economic, structural and environmental. "There is a form of honesty in brick: it fits in the hand. If granite, stone or concrete are austere and imposing, brick is modest, inclusive, accessible," says William Hall, author of the book Brick published by Phaidon. Louis Kahn, one of the great architects of the 20th century, said that brick "knows and can do everything." He used it to build a series of colossal arches for the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh (1982).
It is also the material chosen by Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare for his latest project in the village of Ikise, two hours from Lagos: an artists' residence built in collaboration with local agency MOE + Art Architecture. The building is made of 40,000 handmade bricks from laterite, a naturally red clay abundant in the region.
"This technique does not require any firing and is environmentally friendly as it does not emit any CO2. It also allows for natural insulation of the building: cool inside when it is hot outside, and vice versa, the porous earth regulates the temperature, which remains constant," chief architect Papa Omotayo says.
Reconnecting with a sense of history
Today, clay connects the past, present and future. It continues to inspire several renowned architects like China’s Wang Shu, 2012 Pritzker Prize laureate, who redesigned the contemporary museum in Ningbo by reusing old Shanghai gray-bricks, with other recycled materials.
This is also the case of Italian architect Mario Cucinella, who is now pushing the limits of 3D prototyping with Tecla, a "3D-printed" residential building made out of clay. Combining essential materials and new technologies suggests a sustainable, global response to the climate emergency.
“Besides being suitable for contemporary use, clay bears important societal issues. The strength of these construction models is their replicability: everyone can participate, especially women, often experts in the field. This is a real virtuous economic system that also makes people proud," Diébédo Kéré says.
After using brick, the architect is now exploring new techniques: he mentions a contemporary form of adobe, a mixture of clay and gravel making it possible to mold a house in one piece. He continues to fight so that concrete and glass are not perceived as the only materials that bring modernity and salvation: "What the West imposes on Africa is not adapted to our climate, it requires imports and destroys thousand-year-old traditional techniques. Today, clay must reconnect with the sense of history and triumph again!”
- What Alexander The Great Teaches Brazil About Inequality ... ›
- Inside Sweden's "100,000-Year" Solution To Bury Nuclear Waste ... ›
- Mudbrick Modern: Architecture Dusts Off Old (Green) Ways ... ›
The Dark, Decaying Underbelly Of Online Commenting
In our dreams, it's a world of joyful sharing. In reality, Internet commenters often offer little more than cheap shots and manipulation. Researcher Joseph Reagle explores the history and degeneration of online invective.
GENEVA — Am I ugly? Hot or not? Let's not forget that sharing platforms and social networks were built on the shallowest instincts like these, and the very culture of Internet commenting that affects our everyday digital lives took shape from just such questions.
Northeastern University's Joseph Reagle explores this rumbling topic in his recent book Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web (MIT Press).
Let's go back a bit. In October 2000, two Silicon Valley engineers, James Hong and Jim Young, launched a website called "Hot or Not." The idea was to get Internet users to post pictures of themselves so other users could judge their attractiveness on a scale from 1 to 10. The pair didn't really invent anything. The websites RateMyFace and AmIHot had both launched shortly before, with the very same idea. But Hong and Young hit the jackpot on the click market: A week after their website launched, it was getting two million visits per day.
The idea was replicated in 2003 by Mark Zuckerberg to create his website FaceMash, the predecessor to Facebook, which followed in 2004. A year later, a new version of the idea was developed. "YouTube was partly conceived as a video version of Hot or Not," says Reagle. The major participatory web platforms often included teenagers and young adults filming themselves and asking the world, "Am I ugly?"
Aladin and the cheaters
But the commenting culture has been facing a fundamental crisis for the last few years. In 2012, New York software developer Dave Winer, often cited as the first to have made comments possible on a blog, deactivated the function on his own website, though has recently looked for a new way to bring them back.
[rebelmouse-image 27089581 alt="""" original_size="500x375" expand=1]
Mum's the word. Photo: Bine Bardi
In 2009, legal expert and digital activist Lawrence Lessig had already deactivated his blog comments after noticing that "a third of the 30,000 commentators were in all likelihood scams or spam."
This problem now seems to have entered a critical phase. Last Oct. 16, Amazon filed 1,100 complaints against non-identified people (who go by pseudonyms such as "bondo_man," "kingswiss" or "sohel_mama"), who are accused of writing comments for payment in praise of certain products on the e-commerce website. The recruitment and payment of these commenters were believed to have been made on the platform Fiverr, an online job market connecting digital employers and occasional workers hired for small jobs. Let's also note that, since 2007, Amazon has been officially organizing the exchange of free products for comments via its Vine program.
Two days after Amazon filed the complaints, Belgian daily L'Avenirpublished an article about Internet users accusing the cinema information platform Allocine of publishing fake comments. Considered at the time the predominant online reference for French cinema, the website was suspected of having published phony laudatory comments from supposed audience members to boost the success of the French movie Les Nouvelles Aventures d'Aladin (The new adventures of Aladdin).
Reagle is amused because he says the fraud of publishing self-congratulations under a pseudonym is a timeworn trick. It was used by naturalist Carl von Linné in the 18th century, by writer Walter Scott in the 19th century and by Anthony Burgess in the 20th century.
The sandwich technique
The relationship between the culture of commenting and freedom of expression has a long history, going back, for instance, to the edict through which England's King Charles II attempted in 1675 to ban "coffee houses," places where people talked freely about current events. But on the Internet, communities where the culture of commenting is the most widely used aren't those where expression is freewheeling, but instead is regulated by internal norms of conduct. It's the case in the world of fan fiction, stories written by fans appropriating themselves the heroes of popular sagas (Star Trek, Twilight,Harry Potter) to give them parallel lives, full of romantic-sexual plot twists.
In offering recommendations about the proper way to comment on someone else's fan fiction, a website dedicated to Star Trek mentions the "sandwich technique": compliment, criticize and compliment again.
The commenting culture has now reached a state of simultaneous triumph and retrenchment. A growing number of news websites have eliminated the comment feature, given both their tendency to trigger outbursts of hatred and their weak added value in terms of content. As for websites that use comments as a central element, such as Facebook, they have an effect that is both compulsive and repulsive. If everyone could simultaneously stop using that network, without fear of being disadvantaged compared to others, a very large majority of users would probably pull the plug without any regret.
So many malicious human behaviors have contributed to the crisis: anonymity, for one, and also the physical distance that prevents commentors from seeing the emotional distress inflicted on the recipient. From the isolated, troublemaking troll of the 1990s and early 2000s, Reagle says we've unfortunately graduated to the "trollplex" trend in which "attacks are launched by people with various backgrounds and displaying various behaviors, but sharing one target, one culture and online meeting place."
So what do we do? Cultivate your online space like a garden, Reagle suggests, pulling the weeds so flowers can grow. Or, like the great science fiction author Isaac Asimov recommended, stop reading a comment at the first appearance of a negative adjective.
*Correction: An earlier version of the article incorrectly reported that Joseph Reagle teaches at Northwestern University. He teaches at Northeastern University. Sorry!