Project Overview
- Location
- Oaxaca, Mexico
- Year
- 2021
- Category
- Studio & Workshop
- Size
- 280 m²
- Status
- Completed
About the project
A rammed-earth studio and workshop stepped into a hillside, built with local masons using traditional techniques at a contemporary scale.
How This Project Came Together
01
The Brief
02
The Problem
03
The Approach
04
The Outcome
A working studio for a collective of eight ceramicists.
Taller Ceiba, a ceramics collective, needed kiln space, a shared workshop and small individual studios — on a budget that ruled out importing steel or concrete to a hillside site an hour from the nearest paved road.
Every material had to arrive by mule track or be dug from the site.
Trucked materials would have tripled the budget once transport was factored in. The only economically viable option was to build almost entirely from what the hillside itself could provide — clay-rich subsoil, local stone, and timber from a managed lot a kilometre away.
Rammed earth walls, raised by the same hands that would use the building.
We worked with master mason Rodrigo Peña to rammed-earth the entire structure using excavated subsoil, training members of the collective in the technique so they could maintain the building themselves. The kiln's thermal mass now doubles as a passive heat sink for the studios in winter.
A studio that cost less than a shipping-container alternative.
Final cost came in under the collective's original container-conversion budget, while giving them three times the floor area. Two of the members have since used the rammed-earth skills they learned on-site to build their own homes nearby.
In Detail
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