Uploaded on 2017-02-23 by Pierluigi Dentoni

The photo was taken in my home town, Selargius (Sardinia, Italy). Southern Sardinia has a great tradition of vernacular earthen architecture descending from the Mediterranean earthen culture, as the material was extremely common, inexpensive, easy to shape and overall a sustainable process. During the Italian economic boom (1950s-60s), reflected in Sardinia in 1960s-1970s, its use started to decrease due to the snobbish attitude of the local people that thought that it was a poor material, and hence to the increasing loss of the earth building masters and their inherited knowledge. In the photo, you can see a residential earthen building in a very poor state of conservation. During a reset of the interior layout, the owners demolished the old stone arched gate and built a new concrete architrave. A whole new part of the exterior wall was built with concrete blocks. This kind of imported blocks was very popular from 1970s until 1990s because they were cheap, ready-made, simple to handle and lay, and useful for any intervention from expansion to new building construction. Unfortunately, this generated a new vernacular architecture with very poor quality and unsustainable on many points of view.