World Architecture
Making a Space to Live In
The natural landscape, materials, family connections, and community traditions define the shape and character of our homes.
Bricks, mortar, glass, and wood are commonly used in modern architecture. People continue to use clay, straw, reeds, felt, animal hides, snow blocks, and pits dug into the ground for shelter, a basic need. Humans thrive in vastly different climates, ecosystems, latitudes, and altitudes. We apply ingenuity to design our homes and living spaces.
A house has the potential to do much more than provide shelter. The design and materials reflect deep cultural values of aesthetics and social connections. Long before going "green" became a feature of new construction and the rise of star architects with worldwide name recognition, indigenous people used invention, experience, and ingenuity to build.
Traditional dwellings and their modern updates express human values and cultural traditions. The tents, yurts, gers, and igloos of nomadic people in Central Asia and northern Siberia and North America can teach us about ergonomics and the balance of need and solution met with simplicity. Treehouses in Papua New Guinea and multistory mud family compounds in North and East Africa make use of local, renewable building materials. With their wide and wonderful variety of design, material, form, and function, an exploration of world architecture give us examples of the best ways people have yet devised to live in often challenging environments.