Quarrying a New (Stone) Vernacular

The studio aims to explore architecture as a landscaping process through the lens of materiality. We believe in low impact, sensitive approaches to building, within and beyond the limits of the ways sustainability has been addressed up to now. Our focus is on an architecture of locality in which geology, climate, local community and craft play a critical role in the making of place. Starting from extraction, the architectural design process examined here is holistic in nature, with the maker, the engineer, the user and the architect in constant interrelation, working together as stewards of our natural resources. In effect, the architect is asked to work in service of the material, and no longer as his/her own protagonist. We believe that this can lead to a more sustainable practice. While the focus of our explorations are on stone, we have highly encouraged hybrid material studies, specifically of those extracted from the earth. Our design studio holds the belief that in pursuing circular, net-zero, cradle-to-cradle economic models, we must radically re-think the way in which we source and specify construction materials, and that by revisiting past methods and understanding past logic, we will be best equipped to imagine new and better ways forward.

Studio tutors: Dr Christos Kakalis and Niki-Marie Jansson