Course No.: 848126
Teaching: Andreas Körner, Magdalena Pietryszyn
On Volume and Warmth
Earth remembers how it was handled. Rammed, it holds the pressure of the blow; cast or poured, it records the water that has left it in shrinkage cracks and surface grain that no drawing can fully anticipate. To temper earth is both to prepare a mix and to moderate a climate; the studio pursues the two as one operation. The studio treats these material tendencies not as defects to be suppressed but as its primary design instrument. Working from a fixed mass, one quantity of earth as the entire material budget, students redistribute a single volume through ramming, casting, pouring, foaming, compression, and 3D printing, turning the same matter into different structural, thermal, and spatial conditions. The central question is one of exchange: how much surface can be won from a finite volume without spending its capacity to bank and release heat. Volume tempers; surface negotiates. The same tempering logic extends beyond the building envelope: the ground that is not built on is asked to hold, slow, and release water, so that retention, planting, and the life of the soil are designed with the same attention as wall and hearth. Read through Semper’s hearth and mound, earth appears at once as a centre of gathering and climate and as ground deliberately raised into inhabitable form: terrain made habitable, where mass is structure, thermal regulator, and social centre at the same time.
