My Berber project summary

By Nassim Ouazghari

My name is Nassim and my presentation is about berber houses. First there is a keynote presentation with pictures and oral comments. Right after, there is a home-made video of a Berber house. Afterwards there is a presentation about the way berber houses are built and organized with some plans, then there is a small youtube video of the inside of a Berber house.

Different houses, different beauties

Berber houses are very different from one another as they are built in different regions

Inside Berber houses

As the houses differ, their insides too. For example, some have a terrace, some don’t.

Berber doors and windows, the finest carving

The door’s houses and windows are very important, the carving shows the house’s inhabitants’ wealth, the sign of their region and sometimes the deep origins of the family.

Berber dining rooms

The old dining rooms are always carpets or thin mats on the floor and cushions endorsed to the walls. But living rooms differ from house to house, some have decorations and carpets on the walls, some don’t.

Berber modern dining rooms

Some Berber houses adopted a modern style for their dining rooms: there are high mats and a table in the middle instead of everything on the floor.

Berber kitchens

In the kitchens, we find tea cups, bronze teapots, bronze plates, ovens made of rammed earth and cooking tools made of wood, iron or bronze. They also have pottery like tajines and pots.

Houses’ patios

The patios play an important role in the house, they are a place where the family or the inhabitants of the house meet and have a snack or eat dinner in sunny days.

Berber tents, another type of beauty

Another type of Berber houses are tents. They are made and used by the tuaregs in the desert or shepherds in the mountains. These type of tents are weaved by women. The tissues vary from three colors: black, gray or brown. Most of the tents are black because of the goats’ wool that is black and waterproof. The size of the tent indicates the family’s wealth.

Inside Berber tents

Some Berber tents have a big outdoor place, some are all covered. This differs depending on the family’s wishes.

How Berber houses are built:

Berber houses are built with rammed earth walls, wooden doors and windows and rosewood roofs. The rammed earth is made up of sand, straw and water, and it’s mixed with the men’s feet. This makes a strong kind of home-made cement. The rammed earth is then transformed into bricks, and those bricks are alined to make walls, and they are joined with the rest of liquid rammed earth.

Why should we keep Berber houses?

The Berber houses are still living monuments of history that humans should preserve like the pyramids of Ghizah or the Pisa tower, because they give an addition to humanity with their beauty and their antiquity. They also are THE habitat of a culture, of a civilization that we must keep, that we must care about, cause, if nobody cared about our community and our habitat, it would have disappeared little by little, until the ruins and the rests of us wouldn’t exist anymore. That would happen to the Berbers and their houses if nobody cared about them, and the whole Berber culture would die because of no place to live in.