Concrete blocks are a prefabricated material mainly used to build walls. Like bricks, the blocks are stacked together and joined with a mortar, usually consisting of cement, sand, and water. The blocks are hollow inside to allow for steel bars and mortar filling.
 
These blocks come in a variety of dimensions and textures, from traditional smooth surfaces to fluted or rough finishes, as well as special units for corners or for beams with longitudinal reinforcements.
 
In terms of its thermal behavior, a block wall can work well if the appropriate measures are taken. For example, it is essential to ensure the correct placement of the mixture in all the joints to avoid thermal bridges. In addition, insulators –such as Glass Wool and Polyethylene as a vapor barrier can be incorporated into the interior of the blocks to use as an exterior insulating plaster.

The concrete commonly used to make concrete blocks is a mixture of powdered portland cement, water, sand, and gravel. This produces a light grey block with a fine surface texture and a high compressive strength. Thus, the blocks have a good mechanical capacity, in-combustibility, and acoustic insulation.

The basic block has been changing to provide more complete solutions, such as waterproofing. Some current models include additives added to the mixture that composes them in order to increase the surface tension of the block and hindering the passage of water. There are also blocks with different edges to deflect the water away from its surface.

Architectural Design

Despite being a widely used material in the world, its design possibilities have not been exploited. Concrete blocks are usually associated with self-construction and low-cost housing, situations that provide a few spaces to explore beyond functional design.

The blocks appear as the protagonists of the spaces, totally exposed and showing their original colour, giving a texture and appearance different from brick; more brutal but very adaptable to other materials and elements such as vegetation and water. By using this material, these architects have managed to reduce the costs of their projects without sacrificing spatial and architectural quality.

What other design options seem to arise? Its standard dimensions and its modular nature allow us to design easily, like a "lego", generating topographies that can form furniture or unevenness. By rotating its original position, its perforations can create permeable walls. These are some simple ideas that can deliver good solutions without being unfordable.

A courtyard or court is a circumscribed area, often surrounded by a building or complex, that is open to the sky. Such spaces in inns and public buildings were often the primary meeting places for some purposes, leading to the other meanings of court. Both of the words court and yard derive from the same root, meaning an enclosed space.

We would like to take a focus on the wonderful inner courtyard. The inner courtyard is essentially a "contained outside space" made up of transparent walls, and a well thought-out drainage system is a must. Other elements such as furnishings, decks, vegetation, stairs, water are then added, complicating the space created. The inner courtyard also plays a role in the building's layout; in most cases it functions as the central point from which the other rooms and functions of the project are organized, giving them air and light when the façade openings are not enough.

oes shadow have the power to give form to architecture? The increasing number of transparent buildings and LED installations would enforce the impression that light has eliminated the relevance of shadow. But to answer that question, let’s look back to a master of light whose architecture was shaped by shadow: Louis Kahn.

As identified by Leonardo da Vinci, we often encounter three types of shadows: Attached shadow, shading and cast shadow. The attached shadow falls on the body itself – like a cantilever roof causing a shadow on the façade. The second type belongs to bright and dark contrasts, which are inherent to the form and depend only on the source of light, e.g. a ball shaped pavilion, which even under a cast sky shows a darker zone in the lower part. The third, cast shadow, could be the result of a high house generating shadow on the street due to the projection of the building outline. 

Kahn´s archetypical forms go back to Greek architecture, which he studied in the 1950s: “Greek architecture taught me that the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light. A column and a column brings light between them. To make a column which grows out of the wall and which makes its own rhythm of no-light, light, no-light, light: that is the marvel of the artist.”

However, light was also a central element in Kahn´s philosophy because he regarded it as a “giver of all presences”: “All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.” For him, light is the maker of material, and material’s purpose is to cast a shadow.

And because Kahn believed that the dark shadow is a natural part of light, Kahn never attempted a pure dark space for a formal effect. For him, a glimpse of light elucidated the level of darkness: “A plan of a building should be read like a harmony of spaces in light. Even a space intended to be dark should have just enough light from some mysterious opening to tell us how dark it really is. Each space must be defined by its structure and the character of its natural light.” As a result, the light as a source is often hidden behind louvers or secondary walls, thus concentrating attention on the effect of the light and not on its origin.

And even though Kahn erected many buildings in regions exposed to extreme sunlight (such as India and Pakistan), he did not design his buildings to protect users from the sun, but rather to protect the sanctity of the shadow. He didn’t believe in artificial shade such as the ‘brise-soleils’, instead he used windows and doors in his double walls to direct the light into the interior. As Kahn describes the large open windows and doors “The outside belongs to the sun and on the inside people live and work. In order to avoid protection from the sun I invented the idea of a deep intrados that protects the cool shadow.”

Kahn´s path of designing with shadow attracted numerous followers, like Tadao Ando with his Church of Light, Peter Zumthor and his Therme Vals or Axel Schultes with his Crematorium. They all include shadow as a form giver for silent spaces. This perspective presents a pleasant counterpoint in today’s architecture that strives for dynamic and bright icons. 

A building’s materiality is what our bodies make direct contact with; the cold metal handle, the warm wooden wall, and the hard glass window would all create an entirely different atmosphere if they were, say, a hard glass handle, a cold metal wall and a warm wooden window. Materiality is of just as much importance as form, function and location—or rather, inseparable from all three.

Here we’ve compiled a selection of 10 materials that should be part of the design vocabulary of all architects, as well as links to comprehensive resources to learn more about many of them.

1. Concrete
Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world, making it a good starting material to get to know. However it also has significant environmental impacts, including a carbon footprint of up to 5% of worldwide emissions.

2. Wood
One of the oldest, most traditional building materials around the world is of course timber. The material is beginning to take on new forms thanks to engineered wood products, and with high-rise buildings and even translucent properties, this diverse material is being taken to new heights. reThink Wood has a great collection of resources to learn about designing with wood.

3. Steel
The city skylines as we know them exploded out of our discovery of steel, commonly used for reinforcement but serving as a beautiful skin in several examples. The wiki Steel Construction offers everything you could possibly need to know about designing with steel.

4. Stone
Another material used over generations in certain geographical locations around the world, stone has a wide diversity of textures, colors and strengths. Despite its heavy, solid materiality, one can still work with it to achieve diverse forms. The Natural Stone Institute has a variety of resources including fact sheets and specification sheets for many of the most common types of stone used in construction.

5. Glass
Our most used material to achieve transparency and light is without a doubt glass, one of the most commonly used façade elements in contemporary architecture. Some are taking it a step further, attempting to extend its properties to create "intelligent" responsive glass. The Glass Education Centre is a great place to learn more.

6. Brick
Despite its rigid, rectangular shape made to fit in your hand, brick architecture has been shown to create beautiful structures with the right craftsmanship. Innovative thinkers are also finding new ways to incorporate active sustainability into the small building elements. The Brick Development Association has a collection of resources for learning more about brick.

1. Think Small
The combined problem of natural resource depletion and population growth is so serious that it’s no longer reasonable for anyone to use up more than their fair share of either. Not only that, but there’s something special about creating a home or office that speaks to the specific needs of your particular family. Small homes are more affordable, use fewer resources, have less of an environmental impact, and also require less energy to heat and cool.

2. Heat With the Sun
Speaking of heating, fossil fuels are on the wane but the sun is still going strong. Consult your local green building expert for the best way to orient your home in order to maximize solar gain when appropriate (and reduce it when there’s too much.) Orientation combined with a green building material that absorbs the sun’s energy during the day and then dispatches it slowly at night can drastically reduce your energy requirement.

3. Keep Your Cool
The same principle works for cooling a home, a particular challenge in the Middle East where there is no shortage of long hot days. Passive design, digging into the earth, and insulating a home well will work wonders, as will Islamic design techniques such as the Mashrabiya screen, which beats the heat at the same time as it promotes natural ventilation.

4. Use Renewable Energy
We know this is hard in the Middle East, where solar panels are still quite expensive, but an investment in the short term will pay off in the long run. Plus, who says it’s necessary to buy into the most expensive renewable technology? In Cyprus, Egypt and Israel, lower income people have been using the sun to heat their water for years. Theirs may not be the sexiest roofs in each country, but their energy bills are smaller, and their ability to withstand municipal price and supply fluctuations far greater than grid-dependent folks.

5. Conserve Water
There are as many ways to conserve water in your home as there are reasons to do so – particularly in our dry region. Firm up faucets, harvest rainwater, recycle gray water, take shorter showers, and turn off the tap when brushing your teeth. Also consider planting indigenous plants that don’t require a lot of irrigation, and if you must irrigate, trying using drip irrigation or other modern developments.

6. Use Local Materials
When you’re building a home out of materials harvested in some distant land, they have to travel a long way to make it to your little plot. This creates an unnecessarily high carbon footprint and also reduces the level of control you have over how those materials are harvested. But if you use local materials, as will be the case with Gaza’s 20 new Eco-Schools, your carbon footprint shrinks considerably and benefits your local economy.

7. Use Natural Materials
Natural materials not only have more aesthetic appeal, at least in our view, but it turns out that they are better for our health. A home that is built with a porous natural material such as mud or stone or lime breaths and promotes natural circulation in the home. Anything else creates a terribly unhealthy internal environment. Natural materials also promote daylighting and superior acoustics, whereas all kinds of interventions are required in more artificial surroundings.

8. Save the Forests
Our forests are beautiful and deserve to be protected in their own right. But they also serve important environmental services – including sucking the globe’s carbon. With escalating levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and a bevy of attendant climatic changes, protecting our trees is more important than ever.

9. Recycle Materials
We belong to a throwaway culture – something the earth’s finite resources simply can’t support. Recycling materials not only gives new life to something discarded or disused, but also provides an opportunity to be creative and resourceful. See how old windows have been given new life is this wonderful design project.

10. Build to Last
We have showcased several earth architecture buildings that have lasted centuries, such as Yemen’s Manhattan and these awesome cave homes in Iran. Despite stringent new building codes, many materials used in contemporary architecture are designed NOT to last so that the supplier can prolong their business opportunities. This makes absolutely no sense. Build to last as much as possible and save the earth while you’re at it.