Customer Reviews

Natural Architecture

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I got this book based on the example pictures which you can see on Amazon, and for those it's nice. But many of the really inspiring pictures in the book are available here or other places online. The book covers a wide range of projects, from a practical bridge construction in Tibet to an agricultural education program for kids (which has almost nothing to do with architecture as far as I can tell) to extremely personal works of art. If you read the professional reviews above, you may think the projects in this book share characteristics like decaying over time. The selection is really more a scattershot of whatever Alessandro Rocca happened to like. There are parks and houses included, for example, which are carefully maintained and are not expected to decay at all for the forseeable future.
Unfortunately most of the especially beautiful works are marred by the luridly purple prose attached to describe them. It's the typical modern art nonsense where artists plant an arbor of trees but have to artspeak what they've done into, "a device for alteration of the gaze in paths of access and leaving the place. Its evolution is very closely connected to its reception, which necessarily passes through the sensations received." If you can wade through that kind of self-aggrandizing vocabulary list, more power to you. I for one had to tear out the pictures I liked and toss the book so the text wouldn't ruin the experience of the art.

This beautiful volume has a wide-range of outdoor structures constructed, for the most part, from natural materials. As a member of a community that has built straw-bale structures, I found the range of materials and style of structures quite inspiring.

I recommend this book for anyone intersted in the relationship between the natural world and man-made structures.