Earthbound

Rammed earth is an unpredictable, labor-intensive building material, and far less durable than concrete. It cannot deliver the standard strength expected by engineering academia. And perhaps it is for the better that it cannot. Because it tells us an entirely different story. It reminds us architectural thinking that dares to look outside the box. What I want to share here, is not just a simple studio project, but a profound life lesson for many of us here, lived in the last six months.

Last semester, for the final project of the Basic Design studio I coordinated, we asked the students to build a rammed earth wall system with voids. Together with Serkan Uysal, İpek Kuran, and Sinan Logie, this was a “farewell studio” for all of us. The outcome was a student achievement far beyond expectations. We could not have been prouder of all our students.

The studio finale was a 5-week project, requiring student groups of five to complete work packages covering design, formwork fabrication, mix design, and block production. In my view, “materiality” one of the most prominent concept in computational design found its truest, most fundamental grounding in this project.

Just a week into the project, an unfortunate decision regarding our university was announced, informing us that we could no longer continue our classes. We now live in a world, where such things happen. Over the next 48 hours, our students stood at the campus gates demanding their school and classes back. That taught all of us a great deal. Eventually, the decision was acknowledged as a mistake, and our school was reopened. I will never forget one student’s response when I said, “We are continuing with the earthen walls”:

Professor, we became a human wall for our school; we can certainly build an earth wall.

The weeks that followed were among the most remarkable of my life as an educator. Despite all the obstacles, the students successfully completed their projects. I am sharing only a small fraction here. The walls are still standing firmly at the garden of the faculty building. The students pushed our studio space to its absolute limits (earning our faculty a formal warning, also). To the experts who claimed that building porous wall systems with earth was nearly impossible, they proved that through material experiments, careful geometric logic, and sheer perseverance, it could be possible. This was the last Basic Design studio I coordinated.

True, we may not be able to build skyscrapers with earth. We cannot get massive project fundings, or produce sterile student projects. The failures; the chipped corners, the cracks, the crumbling pieces, the blocks stuck in formwork, were more than enough to let us experience what it truly means to understand nature and a material, to refine it, and to design alongside its sensitivity and relationship with time. That was the beauty of it.