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Dirt, plentiful and cheap, is a construction material with a history that stretches back over thousands of years. Billions of people around the world live today in "stable, warm, low-impact structures" made of dirt. Indeed, if architects aren't looking at dirt buildings to provide sustainable, recyclable solutions to building problems, and mining them for inspiration in their designs, they should be.

So argues California designer and theorist Ronald Rael in his engaging new book called Earth Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, $36.86). To press his case, Mr. Rael presents an international panoply of 47 projects "that are," he tells us, "exemplary of contemporary and progressive earth architecture," all completed since 1970. His examples range from a Tucson luxury home made from compacted dirt and a mud-brick residence in Alice Springs, Australia, to a dirt-block Guinean poultry farming school and an Iran-Iraq war refugee camp in Iran concocted from plastic bags stuffed with local soil.

The results catalogued here are serviceable and often handsome. The dwellings in the refugee camp, designed by the Iranian-born American architect Nader Khalili, are attractive beehive-shaped huts created by coiling the long bags of dirt into ever-smaller circles, and anchoring them in place with layers of barbed wire. Using Mr. Khalili's system, anyone can build a hut quickly without special training or specialized materials. Such simplicity makes the approach handy in emergency situations, where shelter is needed immediately. But one can imagine other applications: homes for survivalists in the backwoods, even permanent housing in remote places.

Most houses Mr. Rael illustrates have been destined for less drastic circumstances than a war-zone, and the earthen parts of them play an intentionally aesthetic role. In a modernistic Australian residence, for instance, the architects established a long, flat front façade composed of compacted tan earth and contrasting cedar panels stained dark brown. The visual result is rich and resonant: Dirt, we find here, can be beautiful.

More interesting, however, are the houses that embody knowledge of earth construction beyond the merely aesthetic. Tucson architect Rick Joy had in mind the multistorey structures put up by the ancient peoples of the American Southwest - imposing earthworks that seem of a piece with the desert - when, in 1998, he created a dramatic house design in his home town.

Like the aboriginal dwellings it recalls, the Palmer-Rose House has been inserted deep in the desert landscape, among native cactuses and trees the architect took pains to preserve. Expanses of floor-to-ceiling glass windows, opening toward mountain and desert views, are framed by massive walls of compacted earth. Tinted with iron oxide to create a glowing rose tone, the material for the walls was a mixture of three local soils and, as a strengthening agent, a portion of portland cement. The artistic success of Mr. Joy's house largely lies in such blending of old methods and modern techniques and materials. Absent here, as elsewhere among the projects Mr. Rael documents, is any dandified archaism. Rather, new construction methods complement and refresh the traditional practices of building with earth.

Like Mr. Joy's, the earth art of Chilean architect Marcelo Cortes emerges from a sustained and fruitful dialogue with the vernacular architectural traditions of his country. Mr. Cortes has long been interested in a wattle-and-daub technology (called quincha) that goes back 8,000 years in Chile and is still practised today. A framework, or wattle, is first built of wooden strips or lengths of cane or bamboo, which is then daubed with a mix of mud and straw. After it dries, this light, flexible fabric is suitable for walls or ceiling panels.

In his update of quincha, Mr. Cortes makes frames of welded wire mesh instead of reeds or wood. Instead of ordinary, unadulterated mud, a sophisticated blend of earth, lime and other chemicals constitutes the daub. If the house by Mr. Cortes included in this book is anything to go on, the humble quincha building technique has made its transition into modern architecture very handily.

This private residence, created in 2005 in a Santiago suburb, began its career as a wire-mesh framework that roughly described a cube. (Some walls are inclined.) The cladding compound was then applied to the metal wattle. The outcome is a pleasing mud house, warm brown in colour, with light, strong walls that support expansive windows. Like the other projects Mr. Rael has presented, it is a lesson in how one of the world's oldest and most popular building processes can be renewed in a high-tech age, lending its ancient beauty to architectural works of contemporary imagination.

jmays@globeandmail.com