Built from the land, by the people who lived on it. This is architecture shaped by local knowledge rather than imported rules. In Mali, the whole town replasters Djenné’s great mud-brick mosque every year. At Great Zimbabwe, granite walls were fitted without mortar; in the Philippines, rice terraces climb whole mountainsides; on a Pacific reef, Nan Madol’s builders stacked basalt into a city. Some were royal works, some the labour of entire communities, but all grew from local materials, climate and skills handed down by hand — and Western surveys overlooked them for far too long.
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