Iceland has a long tradition of building sod houses. Although 40% of the country was probably covered with forests when first settled by the Vikings, those trees were soon consumed for building and burning, and Icelanders were soon left with only rocks and grass. So they built from sod. Sod houses are the log cabins of Iceland - a tie to an idealized, rustic past.

Today, modern buildings (including a large dairy in Reykjavik) include sod as a design element. In the late 1800's, new technologies made it possible to manufacture corrugated iron sheets in Europe, and transport them by steam ship to Iceland. In the 1930s and since, reinforced concrete has been the main building material.

The Arbaer Museum in Reykjavik has several traditional sod houses that you can visit.

I took part in a course on how to build from sod in the late 1980s - it was taught by Tryggvi Hansen, an artist and free thinker. The BBC was in town, and they filmed part of it, I believe for a show called Tommorrow's World.