Underground Architecture Explored: Dikengyuan, Organic House, and nCAVED

Key facts

• Dikengyuan are traditional underground houses on China's Loess Plateau, with courtyards excavated several meters deep and vaulted rooms carved from walls.
• Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space gives the cellar a powerful role, connecting it to the 'irrationality of the depths.'
• Rosalind Williams's Notes on the Underground traces subterranean space through literature and infrastructure as both refuge and source of fear.
• Soil's thermal mass helps dikengyuan rooms stay stable through hot summers and cold winters, similar to Matmata's dwellings in Tunisia and cave houses in southern Spain.
• A University of Hong Kong team revisited the dikengyuan with its Underground House of the Future in Henan, using brick vaults, skylights, and 3D-printed earthen elements.
• A 1979 earth-sheltered house in Scottsdale, Arizona, arranges rooms around an open-air court below the desert.
• Javier Senosiain's Organic House, completed in Mexico in 1985, places curved ferrocement rooms beneath grassy mounds.
• A post-occupancy study of homes around Minneapolis and St. Paul found high resident satisfaction with earth-sheltered living.
• MOLD Architects' nCAVED on Serifos, Greece, embeds rooms into a steep rocky slope, with long stone walls directing the eye toward the Aegean.