From Field to Form: Making with Earth

In this video, Lola Ben-Alon of Columbia University GSAPP’s Natural Materials Lab, moderates a discussion with practitioners, educators, policy advocates, and material scientists to explore the possibilities of earthen materials.
The panel discusses natural earth- and fiber-based building materials, their manual and digitally-driven fabrication, life cycles, and supply chains, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of using earthen materials in construction, renovation, and mass/insulation.
The participants include Lisa Morey, an engineer and architectural designer who owns and operates Colorado Earth, a company that produces adobe and earth blocks; Ronald Rael, a designer, activist, architect, and author whose research interests connect indigenous and traditional material practices to contemporary technologies and issues; Tommy Schaperkotter, an architect, builder, and educator devoted to trans-disciplinary exploration of material cultures, construction ecologies, and interdependencies between built and non-built environments; and Lynnette Widder is an architect, architectural historian, and educator whose work currently focuses on low-carbon renovations of modernist buildings and a grant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop textile-reinforced raw-earth structures for the Sahel region.