Project by Neha Sarah Abraham
This project reimagines clay as both method and matter, as an active construction system embedded in the cycles of labor, waste, and ecology. Beginning with sedimentation tests to analyze site soil, we asked: What does it mean to build with the soil of today - a mix of earth, debris, and contamination? Rather than treating waste as impure, plastics and demolition fragments were shredded and reintroduced into rammed earth and compressed earth blocks, reframing contamination as structure.
Working within a mapped “zone of possibility” of local soils, stone yards, timber waste, and informal economies of reuse, the design foregrounds endogeneity: sourcing, processing, and assembling materials without leaving the borough. The resulting architecture combines stone offcuts, timber waste, and soil-stamped blocks by foregrounding provenance, memory, and craft often hidden in construction. Passive strategies such as shading overhangs, thermal mass, and adaptable glazing emerge not as add-ons, but from the very process of making.
Here, architecture is not a static outcome but a choreography of assembly: dry stacking offcuts, imprinting block origins, and aligning production with seasonal rhythms. Block sizes were calibrated to balance thermal inertia with the weight workers could realistically handle, acknowledging the people who assemble, not just the facades we design. Ultimately, the project challenges conventional ideas of purity, efficiency, and material luxury. It asks: What counts as usable? Who performs the labor? Whose decisions shape what gets built? By embracing inconsistency and treating waste as craft, this work proposes an architecture that is situated, collaborative, and grounded in the messy, layered conditions of the present - where earth is not obsolete, and waste is not invisible, but both are vital to reimagining construction’s future.
