George Brown & Sons Engineering, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2025
This exhibition builds on analogies between earth construction and culinary processes. The exhibition include four ‘proto-architectural’ models and their corresponding recipes. The recipes include ingredients and mixes based on established specifications for mass, light, and rammed earth.
Work on display illuminates the processes of model construction through inclusion of formwork, templates, tampers, drop cloths-turned-tapestries, recipes, and a running ‘how to’ video. All the work is integrated into the infrastructure of the exhibition venue, once a steelworks for ships on the neighbouring canal. Two of the models were damaged en-route to the exhibition venue. As a completely circular material system, they were simply reconstituted on site (crush, add water, tamp, viola!).
Constructed with care from modest, heterogeneous, local materials, the objects revalue natural material systems, which are readily available and sensorially rich but have largely been supplanted in contemporary construction by high carbon, homogenous materials dependent on global supply chains.
Funding: SSHRC Insight Development Grant: Earthworks: Architecture’s Regenerative Material Models.
Related: Proto-architectural Regenerative Material Models
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