Mud Mosques Mali

July 9, 2006 2:17 PM

Mud Mosques: The Black and White Prints / Various locations in Mali.via BldgBlog.
posted by signal (11 comments total)

Beautiful, thanks signal!
posted by carter at 2:30 PM on July 9, 2006

Stunning photos. Thanks for the post.
posted by languagehat at 4:04 PM on July 9, 2006

Beautiful, signal, thanks. There are a few photos of mud mosques in Mali on this site, pages 3 and 4.
posted by madamjujujive at 4:38 PM on July 9, 2006

I'm a big fan of the north-west African mud architecture style, and these photographs are excellent. Thanks for posting.

This is an interesting article if anybody wants to know more about these buildings.
posted by bookish at 5:01 PM on July 9, 2006

You're all most welcome, glad you like!
posted by signal at 5:33 PM on July 9, 2006

Surprisingly awesome
posted by SkinnerSan at 6:02 PM on July 9, 2006

Mmmmm...ali.

Have seen some of these in person :)

Strange that they seemed to skip the biggest & most famous of them all, the mosque in Djenne.
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:35 PM on July 9, 2006

What is the reason for the protruding beams? I've often noticed this, and it seems to me that if wood is rare, you should conserve it by making the beam no longer than necessary to support the structure.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:32 AM on July 10, 2006

"... integrated palm wood scaffolding into the building's construction, not as beams, but as supports for the workers who apply plaster during the annual spring festival to restore the mosque."

OK, UbuRoivas' link answered my question.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:34 AM on July 10, 2006

I'd imagine one reason for the protruding beams might be aesthetic preference. They certainly give the mosques a dramatic profile. Otherwise, it may well be that the "extra" protrusions do indeed contibute to the stability of these mud structures.

They are really beautiful, great post!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:17 AM on July 10, 2006

These photos are perfect for Apple's zoom-pan-fade screensaver. Paste the following single line into Terminal to download all 200 photos:

mkdir mud-mosques; cd mud-mosques; curl -sS "http://archnet.org/library/images/thumbnails.tcl?collection_id=&location_id=8801&place_id=&start=1&limit=200" | sed -Ene '/class="thumb"/{n;s/[[:space:]]*src="([^"]+)".*/url=http:\/\/archnet.org\1/;s/Small/Big/;h;}' -e '/class="thcaption"/{n;s/ +/ /;s/^ $//;s/&([ei])(acute|uml);/\1/g;s/(.*)/\1/;G;s/^(.*)(\n.*\/IBW([0-9]+).*)$/output="\3\1.jpg"\2/p;}' | curl -# -K -

In Safari, a simple cut-n-paste won't introduce spurious line breaks. In other browsers, YMMV.
posted by ryanrs at 7:05 PM on July 10, 2006