Lava Brick

Clay body-house body: the cosmic body

Design (2023)

Authors

Elena Pérez Guembe Situated Architecture - Architecture and the Built Environment
E. Pérez Guembe Situated Architecture - Architecture and the Built Environment
Research Group
Situated Architecture (Architecture and the Built Environment) (TU Delft)
More Info
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Published Date

2023

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Architecture and the Built Environment

Department

Architecture

Research Group

Situated Architecture

Abstract

This lava brick resulted from a situated project that studies, through making, the house–workshop of a Zapotec woman artisan who hosted me over two long periods of time.

The process of working with clay externalised the knowledge of my thinking body by materialising embodied memories in the brick (the 2017 earthquake in Mexico, my training as an architect, etc.), while at the same time internalising new bodily memories created in the process of making and through daily practice in the spaces where the activity took place. Thus, I could tacitly assimilate the spaces’ practical and symbolic functions, everyday dynamics, embedded rituals, and the myths that structure and give meaning to them. The thinking mind comes into play when an architectural analysis is made a posteriori, processing information and making explicit a vast cultural knowledge embedded in spaces that otherwise would have been overlooked because of their seemingly ‘simple’ or ‘uninteresting’ appearance.