Mud, Bricks, and Homes: Cinva-Ram and the Global Desire for Housing the “underdeveloped” world

• In Event: Sedimentary Speculation: Valuing Dust, Mud, Sand, and Stone

Abstract

In the years after World War II, architects, engineers, and businesses became entangled within the desire to create a one-size-fit-all solution to providing cheap, easy to construct, mass housing in the so-called “underdeveloped world.” Using readily and cheaply available materials (earth, cement, lime) and taking models and methods that dominated the colonies, the postwar approaches aimed to produce cheap, climatically adjustable, portable, and “universal” building blocks. Experimenting with locally sourced mud, lime, and/or cement mix bricks, architects appropriated the bungalow (the global colonial home) into a modern house for postwar nascent states as a model of modernization and development. In 1956, Chilean engineer Raul Ramirez invented the Cinva-Ram press as an experiment in methodology by compressing locally sourced mud with lime and cement. Eventually, the Cinva-Ram began to circulate within the UN and its agencies as portable knowledge in its rebuilding efforts. Moreover, the Rockefellers’ International Basic Economic Corporation (IBEC) also began to utilize the Cinva-Ram press as a commercial tool in its global “development” campaign. From experiments in brickmaking in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) to the global dissemination of the Cinva-Ram press, this paper traces the agency of mudbrick as a material, building block, and embodiment of modernization. Using archives and published material, this paper uncovers how different actors developed mudbricks to transcend climate, geography, and society. In doing so, this paper uncovers how a “universal” building material was forged in the years after World War II under the banner of modernization and development. Through handbooks and its adoption into aid agencies, the mudbrick was a form of portable knowledge packaged as a low-tech solution. Eventually, the mudbrick’s proliferation became but a symbol of global development regardless of the environment it landed in.

Author

• Dalal Alsayer, College of Architecture, Kuwait University