Material Studies

Each material has its own logic — how it responds to moisture, how it carries load, how it ages, and what it asks in return for its performance. These studies examine building materials on their own terms.

Rammed Earth Construction

Compacted earth as structural wall — thermal mass, color stratification, and what happens to the surface over forty years of weather.

Bamboo as a Building Material

Tensile strength, rapid renewability, and the particular challenge of connections in a material that is neither wood nor steel.

The Science of Thermal Mass

How materials absorb, store, and release heat — and why the delay matters more than the quantity.

Reclaimed Wood in Architecture

The structural and aesthetic case for timber that has already lived one life. Provenance, grading, and what age does to grain.

Lime Mortar

A binder that breathes, flexes, and reabsorbs the carbon it released in firing. The mortar returns to stone.

Straw Bale Construction

Exceptional thermal resistance from an agricultural byproduct. What compressed straw can and cannot do, and what it asks in return.

Timber Frame Construction

Large sections, visible joinery, and a structural system that reveals exactly how it carries its load. What is legible can be tended.

Stone in Architecture

Mass, permanence, and the geology beneath the building expressed in the building itself. What stone offers and what it demands.

Adobe Bricks

Earth mixed with straw, formed into blocks, and dried in the sun. The oldest manufactured building material, and among the most thermally intelligent.

Hempcrete

A composite of hemp shiv and lime that insulates, regulates moisture, and sequesters carbon. What it does, what it cannot do, and why the distinction matters.

Cob Construction

Clay, sand, straw, and water mixed and stacked without formwork. A monolithic earth wall built by hand, one course at a time.

Natural Plasters and Renders

Clay, lime, and gypsum applied as surface coatings. The skin of the wall, and the first thing the weather touches.

Earthbag Construction

Soil-filled bags stacked in courses, tamped into walls, and reinforced with barbed wire. The bag is temporary. The earth is permanent.

Earth Sheltering

The ground itself as thermal envelope — stable temperature, massive insulation, and the membrane between building and soil that makes it all work.

Living Roofs

Vegetated roof assemblies that insulate, absorb stormwater, and change with the seasons. What grows on top of a building, and what the building must do to support it.

Concrete Alternatives

Fly ash, slag cement, geopolymer binders, and recycled aggregate. What can replace Portland cement, and what changes when it does.

Natural Fiber Insulation

Sheep's wool, hemp, cellulose, and wood fiber. Materials that trap air, buffer moisture, and decompose when their work is done.

The Lifecycle of Wood

From standing timber to structural member to eventual decay or reuse. How wood behaves over time, and what determines whether it persists.

Recycled Building Materials

Reclaimed timber, remelted steel, crushed concrete, cullet glass. Materials that carry the memory of prior service into new structural roles.

Sustainable Metal Alloys

Recycled steel, recovered aluminum, weathering steel. Metals remelted and recast without loss of fundamental properties — the recycling loop, in principle, closed.

Low-VOC Paints and Finishes

Water-based formulations, natural pigments, and mineral binders that cure without releasing volatile organic compounds into the enclosed air.

Materials with High Thermal Mass

Concrete, brick, stone, rammed earth, and water. Dense substances that absorb heat slowly, store it, and release it hours later.

Biodegradable Building Materials

Mycelium composites, hempcrete, straw bale, and natural fiber systems. Materials that grow, serve, and eventually return to the soil.

Eco-Friendly Insulation Materials

Cellulose, sheep's wool, hemp batt, cork, and straw. Fibrous and cellular structures that trap still air and resist heat flow through physical form.

Concrete

Calcium silicate hydrate bound around aggregate. A synthetic stone that begins as powder and water, crosses an irreversible chemical threshold, and continues reacting for decades.

Embodied Energy

The energy a material carries into service from extraction, processing, and transport — invisible but permanent, justified only by what the material does next.

Material Lifecycles

The full arc of a building material: extraction from the ground, transformation through heat or pressure, decades or centuries of service, and eventual recovery or return.

Material Durability and Maintenance

Protective coatings, repair cycles, and the long practice of observation. What determines whether a material lasts a decade or a century is often what happens after installation.

Material Origins

Quarries, forests, riverbeds, clay deposits. Where a material comes from — its geology, its geography — shapes what it is and how it behaves in service.

Vernacular Construction

Adobe, timber, thatch, stone. Material traditions shaped by climate and geology, observed working across centuries — not primitive but precisely adapted.

Material Cycles

Whether a material can return to its starting state — through biological decomposition, technical reformation, or not at all. The chemistry of closed loops and irreversible bonds.

Material Toxicology

What materials release into enclosed air — volatile compounds, formaldehyde, migrating plasticizers — and which materials contribute nothing at all.

Interior Finishes

Mineral paints, untreated wood, natural plasters, and fiber textiles. The surfaces that define interior atmosphere — and the difference between aging and degradation.