ABSTRACT
The image conjured for many is a humanitarian abroad, or locally a weekend volunteer, with a shovel in hand and pencil behind the ear. The cumulative effect of these service-oriented idealizations is that community engagement stays at the periphery of contemporary practice, happening only in spare time, if at all. The transition from lime plaster to concrete as a common building material mirrors well the influence of industrial-scale production to conform building practice towards uniformity and formal abstraction. This influence prevailed to the extent that today a small-scale harvest of materials directly from the land, or the overlay of traditional cosmologies in a building plan, would be regarded as quaint, and not at all representative of normative practice. Pre-modern building production was for most regions necessarily homegrown, informed by the availability of materials at hand and inherited technical expertise. Even up until the end of the 19th century, the cultivation of building materials was considered a social responsibility.
