Spectacular vernacular

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, interpreting spectacular structures from Mali, Mauritania, and Burkina Faso to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and elsewhere.

In these images, white arabesques dance on red walls, and abacus-like mud 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. This edition's new afterword discusses adobe politics in New Mexico, and illustrates the authors' own adobe home.

. Noted Africanist Basil Davidson contributes an introduction that surveys centuries of interplay between Islam, older cultures, and the deserts of Africa and Asia.