Disruptive Tradition

Until something proves profitable, it is not productive.
Not all contemporary innovation is about exploiting digital fabrication or creating wild new forms. There’s enormous potential to bring technology to bear on industrialise local materials’ extraction and traditional structural systems.

We understood that traditional architecture was simply the lens through which we could access resources that until now we had not considered using. We believed that we should learn only the concept of traditional architecture, discarding its form. Later, with practice, we began to realise that when working with the repertoire of traditional architecture materials and trying to optimise their use, one finds formal results similar to those of vernacular architecture, without having initially sought them.

However, we tend to relate the concept of spatial rigidity (working in compression) when we think about constructing with traditional materials of law environmental impact. But, what would it happen if we extended the limit of their manipulation trying to achieve the flexibility (related to elements in tension) of the contemporary ones?

This is what we had in mind when we started this journey. We attempted to achieve a prefabricated element, easy to produce and assemble, based on the spatiality of vernacular architecture (Mediterranean architecture), but using materials and methods that are aligned with the needs of the future. The idea: a prefabricated lime mortar vault.

The question was: Which are the resources and imaginations elsewhere?
That’s why we want to create a prototype for action! A map of local resources with low environmental impact, adapting those traditional earth materials into contemporary possibilities. In brief, this investigation aims to understand and disseminate the poetic possibilities inherent in the qualities of each material, and then, speculating a new vocabulary, where the logics of traditional materials are disrupted.