SPECTACULAR VERNACULAR The Adobe Tradition [SOLD]

SPECTACULAR VERNACULAR The Adobe Tradition

Text by Jean-Louis Bourgeois

Photographs by Carollee Pelos

Publisher; Aperture, New York

Hardback with slipcover. First edition 1989, 191 pages, illustrated with beautiful color photographs

Condition: slight water moisture at top edge but not damaging to text or photographs.  An extraordinary book

From the Slipcover

“Spectacular Vernacular: The Adobe Tradition celebrates the beauty, variety, and efficiency of traditional adobe architecture in West Africa Southwest Asia, and the American Southwest.  In the severe desert climates of these areas, centuries of working with mud in the construction of homes, mosques, and whole villages have given rise to a remarkable range of styles and forms as visually stunning as any fabled city of myth and imagination—or any postmodern metropolis.

“By turns delicate and massive, precise and free-form, indigenous adobe architecture displays a formal richness matched by its technical ingenuity.  In this abundantly illustrated book, architectural historian Jean-Louis Bourgeois and photographer Carollee Pelos act as guides to a little-known world, cataloging and interpreting the spectacular architecture of everyday structures from Mali, Mauritania, and Burkina Faso to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, and elsewhere.  In these images, white arabesques dance on red ralls, and abacus-like colonnades shield farmers from sun and wind; mud is ‘twisted’ into playful columns, sculpted into ornate facade relief, and massed into lofty towers of majestic mosques.  Afgan Muslin shrines display domes molded to resemble breasts, towers to resemble phalluses, while Pakistani wind catchers stud the sky like periscopes to catch a cooling breeze. And in India, entire walls are embossed with adobe trim as delicate as filigree.”