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Places carry meaning long after the lives that made them have moved on. Architectural conservation is a response to the inevitability of loss;driven by the tension between the urge to hold on and the necessity of letting go. It is precisely this transience that renders things worth preserving; not despite their fragility, but because of what it is. Vernacular earthen architecture sits at this sharpest edge; an under-documented dimension of built heritage whose value lies not in monumentality, but in the depth of everyday life it encodes.
This paper presents findings from an architectural and ethnographic study of Mandritsa, a village in the Rhodope Mountains of southern Bulgaria, whose three-storey mud-brick houses embody a critically endangered typological tradition rooted in seventeenth-century Albanian Christian origins and economies of silk and tobacco. Facing demographic decline and abandonment, these buildings pose an urgent question;what happens to a place when the life that gave it meaning disappears?
The paper reads Mandritsa's mud houses as cultural artifacts through which a community once negotiated space, identity, and belonging. Drawing on Relph's concept of placelessness, Habraken's theory of type as social agreement, and Rapoport's form-culture framework, it interprets spatial organization, construction logic, and stylistic expression as layers of accumulated meaning, each reflecting the social world that produced them. Fieldwork combining documentation, oral histories, and ethnographic observation reveals that spatial organization is the most culturally enduring of these layer, persisting as materials erode and maintenance rituals cease.
The paper argues that loss here is not only material but existential; dissolution of knowledge rooted in the collapse of intangible practices, construction knowledge and communal care that once sustained buildings and community simultaneously. It critically interrogates UNESCO's earthen heritage frameworks, which struggle to accommodate the slow disappearance of ordinary places whose significance lies in everyday meaning rather than exceptional value.
Nota biográfica | Short Bio
Himanshi is an architect and heritage researcher with an interest in how material practices and cultural knowledge shape the making of spaces. Currently pursuing M.A. in Heritage Studies at Brandenburgische Technische Universität, Germany. Her work brings together site documentation, ethnographic research, spatial analysis and conservation theory to unfold layered narratives embedded in construction processes and landscapes. She holds a particular interest in the material intelligence of vernacular construction: the knowledge embedded in craft, techniques and the ongoing negotiation between available resources and cultural form. Her current thesis undertakes typological and cultural study of the mud brick domestic architecture of Mandritsa,Bulgaria, informed by fieldwork conducted with European Heritage Volunteers in 2004. Professionally, she has worked across heritage contexts in India, Germany and Nigeria. She holds a Bachelors of Architecture from India, where she also taught architecture design. She designs, teaches and explores heritage as a living and evolving experience.
| Palavras-chave | Keywords | Vernacular architecture | Earthen heritage | Typological analysis | Intangible knowledge | UNESCO conservation frameworks |
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