Our visit to Korestia, villages in Kastoria made from mud-bricks, marked a series of thoughts and ideas about the soil as building rural technique and his opposition to the "purity", stability and impermeability that the dominance of concrete in the modern city. Our original intention was to explore theoretically and practically characteristics of the soil (clay) as building material and then to investigate its presence and change in the urban environment, “constructing” a scenario of civil action and intervention architecture.
This scenario takes the motivation from the theoretical and empirical knowledge about the architecture of the soil and evolves in the context of our basic idea that the soil as a cheap raw material, is one of the most intimate and familiar natural materials that could change the image of the urban landscape through a process of participatory planning and construction of small-scale urban interventions.
The Adobes workshop is an outdoor laboratory briquette production with the participation of city residents. Takes place during a summer month, as it is necessary for the natural drying of the bricks in the sun and its effects occur every weekend from different groups preparing mixtures of different composition which require different drying times.The last weekend of the month and having made the necessary drying time the teams work on the construction of urban intervention by mud-bricks.The workshop is structured spatially from the recurrence of a linear unit that brings together the basic editing functions of the soil and of the processing on a mud-brick (rubbing, sifting, mixing, molding, drying).
The participatory process that enables the ability of citizens to intervene dynamically in through the stages of the production line that turns the soil into structural unit, and this unit in urban landscapes. The perishable nature of the material to the weather allows monitoring of changes of structures during their final full absorption from the environment.
