The Birds and the Bees

Living facades, the vision of a green city – what seems like a pleasant idea is more of a necessity rather than a concept. As a local and recyclable resource, clay must play a more important role in the building sector of the future. How can this material provide habitats for different kinds of living beings? Hollow spaces, surfaces, and plausible contexts lay the foundation for the development of small ecosystems.

“The Birds and the Bees” proposes an open system as a result of material and molding experiments, as well as layering structures resulting from parametric design variants. In addition to the design of the specific modules, the project addresses the willingness of humans to open their own controlled living environments to other species.

Though once a popular construction method within Europe, rammed earth is only slowly rising beyond its niche status. One focus of the research group around the “prog/rammed earth” residency is to make the technique more accessible to a broader audience by demonstrating the versatility of clay and the manufacturing processes around rammed earth – also by leaving the traditional architectural context it is usually applied within.

An early approach to making clay and rammed earth structures more accessible seemed to me to be scaling down the dimensions of large construction blocks. I wanted a potential crowd to understand the raw material and its characteristics by picking up, touching, and handling the material. While exploring modular shapes and systems, I came to appreciate the process of ramming earth, having in mind an analogy of moldable stone.

While originally investigating possibilities for creating hollow spaces that living matter could grow in (such as roots or mycelium), I started to follow the idea of turning the highly condensed and practically lifeless material into a living one.

The focus shifted from using rammed earth as a mold to making rammed earth inhabitable in itself. Integrating the modular approach, I started a series of building bricks while reaching out to specialists for consulting on which species could feel at home in the rammed earth modules.

This concept required further considerations for contextual proposals, such as envisioning the species’ requirements and balancing them with human requirements. Integrating a structure into a home, for example, also means challenging us humans and our willingness to share our living environment.

Using parametric modeling software, I visualized several variants for different stacking options and changing scenarios. What if, instead of gazing at water fountains, we allowed clusters of rammed earth to transform into living islands in the city center and gazed at those instead? What if we were to exchange the tomato plant on the balcony for a small private ecosystem?

To be seen above are proposals of habitats for species that could feel comfortable in such a context. A series of exemplary building blocks could host organisms and species such as the European orchard bee, the Eurasian tree sparrow, or Stonewall Rim Lichen. Additionally, other materials, such as bricks, are intended to complement the rammed earth structure, for example, by protecting it from direct exposure to rain.

While manually prototyping the modules, the process was documented through protocols and videos. Next to sharing findings, a main interest of the documentation was to identify potentials for automation in order to reduce the amount of manual labor needed for the manufacturing of the building blocks.