Home in 17th-century Hungary

"In areas where timber was scarce, many families still lived in hovels sunk into the ground; thus in Debrecen in the late seventeenth century, 336 underground serf's hovels were counted....smoke seemed to be rising straight from the ground...members of the family had one dugout room each; here they lived with children and servants alike....An English traveller, Edward Brown, [noted that] upon seeing the travellers, 'the poor Christians fled to their burrows, like rabbits.' However, when Brown lit a torch and entered the abodes, he was [surprised], for the dwellings were much better inside than he expected: they were divided into rooms and neatly furnished."

From A Cultural History of Hungary: From the Beginnings to the Eighteenth Century (1999), Laszlo Kosa, ed.
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

Needless to say, Hungarians no longer live underground. (Their underground metro is another matter. I rode it in 1999 and learned that one does not throw away one's ticket prior to exiting the station, or one might find one will not be exiting the station.) Some architects are interested in underground dwellings, though it appears to have remained something of a fringe movement within the profession. This is in spite of--or perhaps because of--the fact that the underground house is beloved of a certain strain of do-it-yourselfer, which touts the energy savings, quietude, and fallout protection of living underground.

I like the idea of living in such a way that my house barely disturbs the landscape, and I love the thought of a roof covered in plant life and spilling on either side of my front door--though any such house would need a lot of skylights to stave off claustrophobia.

There is precedent for such homes, of course. Plenty of mainstream buildings exist largely underground. Witold Rybczynski has critiqued the idea that hiding a building underground does much to hide it--at least the type of building people drive up to and walk near in large numbers.

Is anyone playing with the notion of the underground home within mainstream architecture? Might it be a low-cost housing solution for developing countries, just as it was in poverty-stricken Hungary four hundred years ago?