Earthen Temples

Abstract

Religion and faith have accompanied man since the dawn of history. Over time, these two factors gave rise to the need to establish permanent places of worship, which could provide both shelter from the elements during increasingly elaborate rituals and express the important status of said rituals to the community that erected such edifices. Almost every religion has produced distinct forms of temples, each tailored to their specific liturgy and symbolism. The often imposing size of these structures meant that they required significant feats of structural engineering and architectural design to be built, often prompting the development of construction technologies. These technologies made use of locally available materials-one of them being earth, used in one form or another as a part of the different construction technologies which incorporate it. In addition to being a construction material, earth has held great significance in practically every religion and culture as a symbol of fertility, the material from which man has been shaped, the medium through which the gifts of a deity may be bestowed through a bountiful harvest and finally, as a resting place of the dead, be it through the burial of their remains or the scattering of their ashes. It is no wonder that temples are still being built out of this symbolic material, although in the majority of cases it is a matter of local building traditions rather than acting on the aforementioned spiritual connotations. The article describes both historical and contemporary temples constructed using various building technologies employing earth, focusing on how the material has affected their architecture, structure and visual expression.