The Great Mosque of Djenné is the largest mud-brick building on earth — a hand-plastered banco monument re-skinned every spring by the whole town. This system borrows its substance: golden raking-sun ochre laid over a saturated earth-brown ground, ribbed by the projecting palm-wood toron beams and crowned with conical pinnacles.

Nothing here is slick. Surfaces carry the grain of sun-baked mud-and-rice-husk plaster, dividers keep the steady rhythm of buttress and beam, and the warmth deepens from ochre in light to umber in shade — a built thing made by hands, not a screen pretending to be one.