Mud brick city

A story at the BBC says that a palace made of mud bricks in Yemen is in danger of collapse (due to poor maintenance and heavy rain.)

It's a big building, and you wouldn't guess it was mud bricks:

But even more interesting, further down in the story, is a photo of a large number of crumbling mud brick houses "in the Old City of Sanaa":

I had no idea there were such large mud brick buildings anywhere in the world.   

Another site has an interview discussing this place:

These are homes for Yemenis. I know some people had to leave because their homes were damaged. But what is life like in these buildings?

The house develops, as I said, in vertical. So you have the lower floor: storage, the kitchen and so on. And two or three rooms per floor where the family or the extended family lives. So, of course, now they have more modern services. The toilets and so on are more modern than the old ones, but still they live in the same way. 

I'm guessing there are no elevators. So if you have company over, they have to walk up nine stories if you're on the top floor.

Absolutely. And not only that, but you are at 2,200 meters high. It's one of the highest capitals in the world. So it is quite an effort, I would say.  

You're running out of breath by the time you get up to the ninth story. 

I would say so. But the inhabitants are used to that. 

I've been in mud brick structures before, some two stories high. But it's hard to imagine anything in mud brick taller than that. As an architect, what in your training prepared you to appreciate this construction? 

These are the highest buildings in mud brick in the world. The fact that they are one adjacent to the others, of course, helps with the height. But they are all individual houses with different plans and layout, built around a staircase — a stone staircase that goes from the lower floor to the upper floor. And the rooms open around this staircase. So people move all the time from one floor to another and some floors are dedicated to the kitchen, some other to women. And as you move up, you know, there are more open space and the public space for the house and the community. 

Oh well.  A fair chance that climate change might wash away this city over the next century, perhaps?