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Training Centre of the Auroville Earth Institute |
Welcome to Earth Architecture!
Our Mother Earth gives us a wonderful building material, which should be used with awareness, sensitivity, and with much respect and gratitude. The Auroville Earth Institute is acting for this recognition.
Earth is Alchemy - Ibn Yamin, Sufi poet
I dont see the Earth as a formless material without consciousness, but as Spirit consciously disguised as matter.
Yes, even the earth has a consciousness, although this consciousness is not intellectualized and cannot express itself.
Mirra Alfassa, the Mother
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Data website with 111 pages, 2297 photos and illustrations, 15 video clips and more than 99,000 words
The worldwide network of earth builders, CRATerre-ENSAG, the UNESCO Chair “Earthen Architecture” and the Auroville Earth Institute call for solidarity to defend and promote widely earth architecture. Click here to read the Manifesto for the right to building with raw earth. If you adhere to this call, please sign in here.
Vaults of the Ramasseum ~ 1300 BC - Egypt |
This data website aims to bringing awareness about earth architecture and technologies, and it covers worldwide examples from past to present. May this site invite you to know more about the wonderful possibilities of the earth as a building material!
• 40 % of the world population lives in earthen dwellings
• 25 % of the world population does not have access to decent housing
(Statistics from UNCHS)
• 17 % of the “world cultural heritage sites” is built with earth
• 25 % of the “world heritage sites in danger” is built with earth
• 14 % of the “hundred most endangered world heritage sites” is built with earth
(Statistics from UNESCO)
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Apartments on four floors at Vikas - Auroville |
For millennia men proved that they could live in a sustainable way. They lived in harmony with nature. They used it and still respected it. People used earth as a raw material with a lot of sensibility. The "modern" fashion of the 20th century created a break with the millennia old developments. Our Mother Earth has been spoilt and abused. The 21st century should find again the harmonious link between man, nature and spirit.
At the dawn of this new millennium, our Mother Earth gave us two challenges:
How to build with earth on a large scale, while respecting Nature?
How to realize architecture full of light, suppleness, simplicity, imagination and beauty with a heavy and formless mud?
The Auroville Earth Institute, which was previously named the Auroville Building Centre/Earth Unit, attempts to fulfil these goals. The Auroville Earth Institute has government approval for the use of compressed stabilised earth blocks especially for disaster resistance.
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