TERRA

A CLAY UNEARTHING 

Using clay as a building material to showcase its previous uses alongside its many unexplored potentials including supplementing it with additional materials, allowing the material’s behavior to dictate the user’s journey inside. Thus, allowing the introduction of clay into the contemporary realm past vernacular employments exhausted. It is A cultural container and clay research center that explores the material from its fabrication uses to the recreational and therapeutic ones while linking amongst the local communities on site. Essentially, unearthing the more the material has to offer. Breaking the stigma of clay as a traditional or primitive technique that is only used in less developed parts of the world. The goal of this project is to create an innovative architectural prototype that bridges between using clay and contemporary technology.

A boundary is usually set between what is less and what is more, but what if these boundaries were to be breached? Freeing the less and focusing on the more it has to offer. Located at Al Fustat, the project capitalizes on what’s encompassed between the locals hands, taken as their primary cultural container with just earth and water clay holds the capability of morphing into any form its environment allows it to be and it is not. The building geometry and construction system employed is always derived from traditional, Egyptian structural elements. That have their physical boundaries and limitations pushed through the introduction of modern techniques by analyzing and adapting the scope of previous works using high tech fabrication methods exploring clay to local abilities. These techniques primarily being the 3D robotic fabrication using clay supplemented with natural additives.