EARTH ARCHITECTURE

On November 4-6, 2005, The Adobe Alliance will offer an intensive vault-building workshop. The group shall be limited to 20. We will build, as usual by hand, the beginnings of a vault since it takes two weeks to complete one. The first courses are the most difficult as it is essential to master the technique of inclining the first bricks properly against the back wall which will support part of the load of the vault (most of the load descends in exquisite equilibrium into the 18″ width of the earthen brick wall.) Hands-on instruction is given by project manager/ adobera Jesusita Jimenez and theory by Simone Swan, designer.Bring work clothes, hat, gloves, heavy shoes, sun protection, a bucket, a float and water. Primitive camping available on site but without water. Lodgings are available in Presidio and Ojinaga, Mexico (across the bridge). Potluck meals at Swan House and/or Thai catering. Participants are also invited during the three weeks prior to the workshop in order to build the sustaining walls for the vaulted roof. Interns receive room and board, first come first served! If an intern wishes to join our work in plastering between November 6th and 10th, please write us. Cost is $250 by October 20, $300 thereafter. Scholarships available. Download poster (PDF)

PROGRAM DATES FOR AREA SUMMER DESIGN+BUILD

June 1 – July 1 2005

AREA is a summer research+build workshop that engages a 90 year old abandoned mud-brick building, located in the town of Marfa, Texas, as the testing grounds for questioning the notion of detail, the theme of this years inquiry. Through a series of explorations that examine the process of making and unmaking in architecture, participants will design and build full-scale interventions that respond to a critical examination of place and program while addressing local/global and industrial/non-industrial agendas for architecture by employing raw earth as the primary building material in these investigations. Marfa serves as an ideal laboratory from where to study these issues. It is a town constructed almost entirely from mud-brick and transformed by rich historical, cultural and geographic forces. At 5,000 feet above sea level, it is one of the oldest cultivated areas in the United States. Located 60 miles from the U.S./Mexico border, Marfa is also home to the Chinati Foundation, an internationally renowned contemporary art museum, founded by Donald Judd, whose emphasis is on works in which art and the surrounding landscape are inextricably linked. Participants will have the opportunity to visit this extraordinary cultural and geographic landscape through a series of directed and self-guided field-studies. AREA is an initiative of the School of Architecture at Clemson University and made possible in part by the Adobe Alliance, a non-profit organization committed to the dissemination of traditional earth building technologies.

MORE INFORMATION AT: www.areainstitute.org