COURTESY RORY GARDINER

Changing Architecture from the Ground Up

METROPOLIS’s 2024 Fall Issue explores projects and practices that blend tradition with innovation, challenging the status quo in architecture and design.

Unconventional architectural materials—including materials that have fallen out of use in contemporary Western architecture but are still mainstays for communities elsewhere—often go through boom-and-doom cycles. Rammed earth construction, for example, pops up every now and then within the sustainable architecture movement, but some consideration always tempers the excitement. The latest? Many local building codes require a significant amount of cement mixed in to stabilize the earth, which could end up negating the savings in carbon emissions.

When we try to bend age-old materials to fit present-day codes, worker skills, and lifestyles, that’s when we fail. Instead, how can we follow the lead of Indigenous communities and allow the synthesis of material and methodology to open up new possibilities of living? 

Because there’s no one way to build with mud. Our collection of stories on earth construction starts with a brief modern history of American adobe, underlining the pitfalls of romanticizing a construction method while disavowing its context and community. In contrast, a host of international practices are responding to local conditions and needs to find diverse ways of designing with earth. In Thailand, Suphasidh Architects took a slow, artisanal approach to rammed earth; in Senegal, Worofila turned to compressed and stabilized earth bricks; and in Mexico, Taller Hector Barroso used local soils to integrate building and landscape. Each project—commercial, multifamily residential, or single-family residential—invites its inhabitants to engage a bit differently with their environment. For projects and contexts where these methods might feel outré, earth-based building products and solutions provide relatively easy ways to align buildings closer to the planet with clean, non-exploitative materials.

Abeer Seikaly’s Weaving a Home is a portable dome shelter for displaced communities constructed from a double-layered performative structural fabric. Photo: courtesy Abeer Seikaly

Architecture and interior design simply cannot maintain the status quo, knowing what we know today about the state of our ecosystems, the impacts of our material choices, and the rights of long-marginalized communities. The practices and research groups profiled in this issue are corralling the expertise and experience we need to keep evolving. 

Equipo de Arquitectura designed its own office (Caja de Tierra, or Earth Box), a modest-size rammed earth building immersed in its natural surroundings. Photo: Jason Schmidt

At universities around the United States, new knowledge and methods are being developed, whether that’s a robot saw to aid in wood-based construction or applications of AI to help sites in the Gulf of Mexico that are vulnerable to flooding. Meanwhile, five emerging practices (all shown below) in our “New Approaches” series navigate tight budgets, new materials, avant-garde processes, grassroots construction techniques, and existing building stock to make places and spaces like we’ve never seen before. And finally, we hear from three architectural firms that are negotiating new relationships between communities, planners, and architects.

Somewhere in these stories, we hope, is a seed of inspiration that can take root and transform your practice. 

Read every story from our 2024 Fall Issue:

Earth Construction

New Approaches

More from the Fall Issue

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