In the middle of Colorado’s San Luis Valley, a progressive architecture and design firm is proving that everything old is new again. Also, that the future is mud.
Combining indigenous mud-based building materials with 21st century robotics, California-based Rael San Fratello created the oddly beautiful structures of “Casa Covida,” their “proto-architectures” that connect high- and low-tech traditions. Its name is a nod to both the pandemic and the Spanish word for “cohabitation.”
The project recently took a virtual bow in an impressive hour-long event hosted by the Architectural League NY. (The video is online.) The partners, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, spoke from Antonito, in southern Colorado, and took questions about their work and about “the social agency of design.”
Seated by a fire inside one of Casa Covida’s adobe structures, Rael says in the video, “Buildings made of earth are usually seen as buildings for poor and rural environments. But all around the world on every continent are hundreds of thousands of cities made out of mud…we often overlook that they have existed for thousands of years.
“And so, really, I’m offering this counter position, to thinking about how we advance as a technological society by not employing materials that are damaging to the ecology and environment but in fact may be corrective to our ecology. The big question is, how do we position this material as a contemporary material, one that aligns with our contemporary sensibilities? That is a design challenge.”
The house is made of 3D-printed coils of adobe in three round areas comprising a sleeping chamber, a bathing room and a sitting area with a fireplace. The project has already won a 2020 Art + Technology Lab Grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Part of the team’s Mud Frontiers series, “Casa Covida” is a work in progress, “exploring robotic additive manufacturing,” using local soil near the Colorado/New Mexico border.
Everything in the borderlands is about fusion — language, food, music, belief systems — Rael notes in the video. “We’re thinking about how technology and tradition come together to make new forms of architecture,” he says. 3D printing adobe is just the latest hybrid.
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