[Cob] Banco- earthen houses in NIger

[Dirtcheapbuilder-Charmaine Taylor]

  Amazon has a viewing of the book
http://www.amazon.com/Banco-Adobe-Mosques-Inner-Niger/dp/8874390513/ 
ref=si3_rdr_bb_product/104-7703195-4438353

Banco: Adobe Mosques of the Inner Niger Delta (Imago Mundi series)  
(Hardcover)
by  Dorothee Gruner, Jean Dethier, Sebastian Schutyser (Photographer)   
"The 520 photographs by Sebastian Schutyser presented in this book  
constitute the bulk of his vast corpus of work on the mud mosques of  
Mali..."


if you choose the LookInside feature- see all that is offered THEN     
hit "SURPRIZE me" you can view up to 20 pages of text and incredible  
images before they wise up and shut you out,, errr,  want you to buy.  
But the book  is not avail, so enjoy the cool B&W images

enjoy! it is worth fooling with it for a few minutes to view the  
structures
  Charmaine Taylor Publishing
www.dirtcheapbuilder.com
PO BOX 375 CUTTEN CA 95534  USA
Tel:  707-441-1632
New Books-DVDs-CDs on Natural/House Building

Banco: Adobe Mosques
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
  As the Bechers – the famous German photographers – have made us  
discover the morphology and powerful beauty of 19th and 20th century  
industrial archeology, the photographs of Sebastian Schutyser reveal a  
neglected African architectural heritage: village adobe mosques in  
Mali. His black and white photographs (beautifully reproduced in  
duotone) emphasize a plastic language now extremely rare: an artistic  
fusion of architecture and sculpture. Is it architecture with  
sculptural qualities? Or is it rather architectonical sculpture? We no  
longer know; our mind and our senses are disconcerted by the cultural  
exception of this special creative mixture. Yet, at the origin of each  
of these creations we won’t find a sculptor or an architect: only  
village craftsmen; master artisans who have updated an ancestral skill  
of molding raw earth. Indeed, it is not the expression of a bygone  
popular culture: the majority of these mosques have been built or  
altered in the 20th century; thus, they simultaneously belong to a  
living tradition and to modernity. These images exalt the strength and  
beauty of a language that eludes globalization. They emphasize the  
grain and substance of the clay—smoothed by hand or cracked by erosion.  
They exacerbate the reassuring solidity of the masonry, the sensuality  
of the textures and, at times, the eroticism of the shapes. The  
methodological approach of the photographer shows a regional  
architectural typology unitary yet very diverse. The book includes a  
photographic appendix which documents all the principal adobe mosques  
of the Inner Niger Delta (520 of them) with the name of the villages  
and geographical coordinates.

About the Author
  Sebastian Schutyser spent his childhood in Congo. He has a master  
degree in photography. His work has been exhibited in the Royal Africa  
Museum of Tervuren, the Noorderlicht Photography Festival (NL) and the  
Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.