Soft Boundaries

Year: Fall 2020, Harvard GSD, Instructor: Farshid Moussavi Location: Paris, France Type: Live/Work Housing

Flamingo Estate approached us to design and build their first physical location for their 2020 Pop-Up in Los Angeles. Due to the temporary nature of a pop-up it was important to us that our project implement a circular economy of materials. An earthen material would be temporarily compressed into walls, only to be broken apart after the pop-up concluded and re-used at our client’s terraced farm outside of Los Angeles. Our client is an agriculturalist and could use clean earthen material for landscaping purposes at his hillside farm. We designed and produced ceramic tiles that were temporarily affixed via earthen grout, and ceramic shards from testing glazes were crushed and used as aggregate in our rammed-earth mixture. After the pop-up concluded, the tiles were removed and will be used in cladding a forthcoming housing project in 2022. The materials yielded an enigmatic result that celebrated the art and craft of building and design across scales in tandem. Fundamental ideas of design and construction were leveraged, especially aspects of how two materials meet, how different types of corners and edges are resolved, and how to represent solidity and mass. The project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between an architectural designer and a ceramicist that utilized two skill sets to create a project that neither of us would have been able to make on our own.

Massing Strategy: