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The Architecture of Mud. 1999. 52 minutes, color. A film (and video) by Catering Borelli. For more information, contact Anonymous Productions, Documentary Educational Resources, 101 Morse Street, Watertown, MA 02472; 617-926-0491; [email protected].
Yemen has long been admired for its stunning and very distinctive mud-brick architecture. In the "old city" of the capital, Sana'a, for example, there are hundreds of houses between five and eight stories tall whose foundations are made of stone and the upper stories of sun-dried mud bricks, the latter laid to form an intricate geometric pattern on the external facades, sometimes whitewashed for greater visual relief. Beautiful stainedglass and alabaster windows filter the light of the harsh Arabian sun into rooms that are cool in the summer, warm in the winter. More dramatic still and quite different from the "northern" style, though obviously part of the same grand Yemeni masonry tradition, is the architecture of the Wadi Hadhramawt and its adjoining valley, the even more dramatic Wadi Do^sup c^an. Not only has this part of Yemen had a different cultural history from that of the north-due to emigration from southeast Asia and particularly Malaysia, as well as to British colonial rule-it has also nurtured a different urban...