Across China’s Loess Plateau, an entire house can disappear beneath a field. The dikengyuan begins with a courtyard excavated several meters into the earth, then expands sideways as vaulted rooms are carved from its walls. Seen from above, the agricultural landscape continues nearly uninterrupted. Only the rectangular opening gives the house away, a patch of sky surrounded by ground where we expect to find a roof.

Living here reverses some of the most familiar cues of domestic space. The earth moves from beneath your feet to around your body. Entering means descending, and exterior walls become geological mass.

Even though humans have lived this way for centuries, underground space still brings an unusual psychological charge. A buried room can suggest protection and intimacy, but that same depth can cause unease. Between these contrasting reactions is the basic architectural question of, ‘what makes being underground feel like shelter?’

Shanzhou Silo-cave, Loess Plateau, Sanmenxia City, China | image via Trip

Gaston Bachelard gives the cellar an unusually powerful role in The Poetics of Space. His imagined house stretches vertically between attic and cellar, with each end belonging to a different mental world. The roof can be understood through construction and weather. The cellar reaches into what he calls the ‘irrationality of the depths,’ a space connected with darkness and whatever lies beneath the familiar parts of the home.

Rosalind Williams follows that cultural pull further in Notes on the Underground, in which she traces subterranean space through literature and infrastructure as both refuge and source of fear. Tunnels and sewers opened hidden worlds beneath nineteenth-century cities at the same moment writers were filling the underground with imagined civilizations and technological futures.

These associations are culturally specific, of course. Someone raised in an underground courtyard house may understand descent very differently from someone whose strongest references are basements and bunkers. Architects must reckon with those associations and negotiate with them.

image courtesy Penguin Classics

The practical case for going underground is surprisingly direct. Soil changes temperature far more slowly than air, allowing thick earth to buffer interiors against large swings outside. Across the Loess Plateau, this thermal mass helps dikengyuan rooms stay more stable through hot summers and cold winters. Similar logic appears in Matmata’s excavated dwellings in Tunisia and the cave houses of southern Spain, where the ground becomes wall and roof at once.

A University of Hong Kong team recently revisited the dikengyuan with its Underground House of the Future in Henan. Existing earthen chambers were reinforced with brick vaults, and skylights and rear openings brought daylight deeper inside.

The central courtyard became a stepped communal space beneath a translucent canopy. While digital fabrication enters through 3D-printed earthen elements, the spatial idea remains centuries old. The space is excavated and built sideways, with the sky left open in the center.

Underground House of the Future, University of Hong Kong, 2026 | image courtesy Olivier Ottevaere

That vital opening to the sky appears again and again throughout subterranean architecture. A 1979 earth-sheltered house in Scottsdale arranges its rooms around an open-air court below the Arizona desert, where full-height glazing pulls sunlight into spaces buried on every side. From ground level, much of the architecture disappears. Descend the stairs and the interior opens outdoors again.

Environmental psychology helps explain why this gesture carries so much weight. Studies of underground environments repeatedly connect discomfort with reduced daylight, weak orientation and diminished control over one’s surroundings. Recent research has also found emotional state and performance decline as daylight decreases underground.

Seen through that lens, the courtyard does much more than just ventilate the house. It brings part of the surface down with you, so that eventually the sky becomes a way to orient yourself.

underground house in Scottsdale, Arizona, 1979 | image courtesy Zillow

Javier Senosiain, the architect best known for Quetzalcóatl Park outside Mexico City, approached the buried house through the idea of refuge. His Organic House, completed in Mexico in 1985, draws from the logic of animal shelters and early human dwellings by placing curved ferrocement rooms beneath grassy mounds. Walking across the garden means crossing the roof. Inside, windows pierce the enclosing shell and pull greenery close to the curved walls.

There is another side to enclosure here. Humans often seek spaces that wrap closely around the body, from sleeping alcoves to deeply recessed rooms. The psychological difference seems tied to agency. Research into subterranean environments repeatedly returns to perceived control, and studies of earth-sheltered homes suggest that expectations can differ dramatically from lived experience.

One post-occupancy study of homes around Minneapolis and St. Paul found high resident satisfaction, with attitudes toward earth-sheltered living improving after people moved in. The underground house may feel stranger in imagination than it does in use.

La Casa Orgánica (Organic House), Javier Senosiain, Naucalpan de Juárez, Mexico, 1985 | image courtesy Javier Senosiain

At Casa Tierra in Córdoba, UMMO Estudio occupies an existing limestone formation, placing domestic space directly against rough calcarenite surfaces. Polished floors and inserted partitions sit beneath stone shaped long before the house arrived. Part of the room belongs to geology, and the architecture works around it instead of fully controlling its form.

Olgooco’s Inside Home in Ammameh, Iran, takes another approach, arranging cave-like spaces around an interior void while planted surfaces continue overhead. Across these projects, a pattern begins to emerge. Architects bury rooms, then cut openings back toward daylight. They cover roofs with earth, then remove sections to make courtyards. The ground provides enclosure, while architecture decides how intensely the body should feel it.