Bio-climatic design strategies in M'zab material culture. André Ravéreau's "implicit construction"

The paper analyzes some selected works of French architect André Ravéreau (1919-2017). A pupil of Auguste Perret, Ravéreau dedicates a relevant part of his life and work to studying and protecting the anonymous domestic buildings of the M’zab valley, a desert region in southern Algeria. In such an untoward area to any human settlement, Ravéreau aims at understanding the relation between the place’s climate and the architectural features of its domestic buildings. Due to the lack of resources and building materials, Moabite popular culture empirically develops its own devices to control exposition to sunlight and thermal dissipation. Ravéreau rediscovers the bio-climatic design strategies of the local architectural tradition and uses them to realize some outstanding and innovative building solutions between the Sixties and the Eighties.