Abstract
"It's exceptionally comfortable for a mud house!"
The surprise embedded in that sentence is where this thesis begins. A third of the world's population still builds with earth. Yet earthen architecture is disappearing, not because the material has failed but because the narratives surrounding have fueled stigma. Equated with poverty, primitivity, and backwardness, soil has been systematically dismissed by the same modernist and colonial frameworks that elevated concrete as the material of progress, civilization, and the future, ignoring concrete's own material ancestry in the very mud it sought to supersede. This thesis traces how those narratives were produced, how they have operated, and what it might mean to think beyond them.
Auroville, an experimental township established in Tamil Nadu in 1968, is the site through which this argument unfolds. Conceived as a universal city and planned through a modernist master plan known as the Galaxy, Auroville was meant to give concrete form, quite literally, to the ideals of a prominent Indian activist and philosopher, Sri Aurobindo. When the Galaxy's abstract geometry encountered the red laterite soils of an eroded South Indian plateau, its trajectory shifted. The communities that settled the land turned to soil, not by ideology but by necessity, and five decades of earthen experimentation followed. That shift has been read, institutionally and globally, as failure of completion and implementation. This thesis argues that this reading itself is a product of bias, rooted in the same colonial and modernist narratives that dismissed earthen architecture as primitive while instrumentalizing it in times of crisis and vilifying it in the face of concrete modernity.
Auroville's shift to soil is contextualized through concrete's manufactured association with modernity and the parallel, largely suppressed history of earthen architecture — two histories whose unequal weight produced the bias through which Auroville has been misread. The thesis then follows Auroville's material history in parallel with earthen building cultures at Djenné and Bam to propose an alternative framework rooted in Jane Bennett's concept of vibrant matter and assemblage theory, Amos Rapoport's work on the affective and pre-verbal dimensions of human response to built environments, and the empirical research of Marta Lorenzon on the sensory and neurological dimensions of earthen construction. In the proposed framework, earthen built forms are understood as outcomes of earthen assemblages. Since assemblages operate through distributed agency, charting the affect of mud within them allows the interactions between actants to be tracked and understood through human perception. Within these shifting assemblages, five nodes are identified where the affect of mud consistently and predictably manifests: community and builders, skilled masons, literary tradition, material composition, and extractive landscape.
The thesis concludes by asking what the material exploration of Auroville, Djenné, and Bam, read through the proposed framework, makes possible. The implications of this framework extend beyond narrative — the assemblage framework and its five nodes offer a direct basis for reconsidering preservation policy for earthen built systems. This remains a direction for future research. Polyphonic, living, and webbed are offered not as replacements for existing terms like vernacular, primitive, and sustainable but as possibilities that move beyond the social stigma those labels carry while keeping what they correctly identified. Together these terms position earthen architecture as a living, relational, and ecologically entangled building culture whose intelligence has been systematically obscured.
