Project

Built mostly between the 12th and 20th centuries, the circular hakka tulou mud dwellings in China's Fujian province reflect an egalitarian society. A tulou is usually a large, enclosed and fortified earth building with thick load-bearing, rammed earth walls between three and five stories high and housing up to 80 families. Smaller interior buildings can contain halls, storehouses, wells and living areas, the whole structure resembling a small fortified city. Families were allocated an identical amount of space within the "kingdom", as the compounds were called. The fortified outer structures are formed by compacting earth, mixed with stone, bamboo, wood and other readily available materials, to form walls up to six feet (1.8 m) thick. Branches, strips of wood and bamboo chips are often laid in the wall as additional reinforcement. The tulou is a well-lit, well-ventilated, windproof and earthquake-proof building that is warm in winter and cool in summer. Tulous usually have only one main gate, guarded by 4–5-inch-thick (100–130 mm) wooden doors reinforced with an outer shell of iron plate. Communal living was a means of defense against bandits. ©2013 Deidi van Schaewen / Vitra Design Museum

In my architecture thesis, I cited Olivier Marc. He had asked the question: why did humans leave earth homes such as caves and grottoes for a more precarious habitation? An evolutionary demand, an inner compulsion, he says. In his ruminations on the matter, he arrives at what he considers the threshold of creativity — where the ancient humans were confronted with a challenge for which there was no external model and so began to find a correlation to an image within. From here, he extrapolates, humans sought to create a replica of their own mother’s womb and, so, house was born into existence.

In a slightly different approach to the question of “house,” architects Charles Moore, Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon in their book The Place of Houses ask “Did nature provide the conceptual model for the hut before the necessity of shelter forced men to build themselves huts?” They in part respond by quoting Sir William Chambers’ writings on primitive architecture: “at first, they (primitive peoples) most likely retired to caverns, formed by nature, in rock, to hollow trunks of trees, or to holes dug by themselves in the earth. But soon, disgusted with the damp and darkness of these habitations, they began to search after more wholesome and convertible dwellings. Animal creation pointed out both materials and methods of construction; swallows, rooks, bees and storks were the first builders. Man observed their instinctive operations. He admired, he imitated, and, being endowed with reasoning faculties and a structure suited to mechanical purposes, he soon outdid his masters in the builder’s art.”

So, while nature apparently provided the model for both Marc’s and Chambers’ scenarios of primitive peoples’ move from original earth shelters to houses, one seems to have been extrinsic and the other from an intrinsic source.

Whichever inference we understand to be true, it seems undeniable that the homes of the early builders were “part of a harmonious whole... land, man and dwelling were indissolubly bound together,” as Marc writes. “There existed then a secret contrivance between our ancestors and their environment which made it possible for them to play with the elements, to grasp the sun at the right moment, to send the wind away in winter, to canalize subtly the summer breeze, to tame light and shadow. They were firmly fixed to the place and were part of a whole composed of subtle harmonies.”

In this agreement between the primitive architect and the environment, there was little margin for error in coping with natural forces: gravity, heat, cold, wind, snow, rain, and flood, according to James Marston Fitch in Shelter: Modes of Native Ingenuity. “The primitive architect works in an economy of scarcity — his resources in materials and energy are severely restricted.” Perhaps because of this implicit order of lifestyle “(primitive architecture) reveals a precise and detailed knowledge of local climatic conditions on the one hand and, on the other, a remarkable understanding of the performance characteristics of the materials locally available,” he adds.