Gnanli Landrou’s 21st century mud construction

If you’ve ever built a sandcastle, you’ll have seen a demonstration of a simple fact: when you make a building, you also make a hole. With a sandcastle, it’s a hole in the sand of roughly equivalent size. You probably make it circular and use it as a moat. The same is true for every building. All the stone, sand, or clay had to be extracted from somewhere else.

As a general rule, the closer the extraction site is to the building, the more sustainable it is likely to be. This is often a given...