General Information

The architecture offices Arqbag cooperativa and Edra arquitectura km0, together with the construction company Coeco cooperativa, begin a project for the design, consulting, and prefabrication of construction products in raw earth with a focus on reducing construction emissions and generating new decentralized employment opportunities. The protagonist of the project: construction with earth.

Catalonia has a long tradition of building with earth, from the lands of Ponent to the Empordà, but the industrialization of building materials has overshadowed traditional techniques such as building with raw earth. But could we recover earth as a construction material adapted to current needs?

Building with raw earth has many benefits for the habitability of the spaces around us. It is not only a material that allows for structural walls, but due to its mass, it has high thermal inertia, meaning it stores heat in winter and gradually releases it, regulating the interior temperature, just as it does in summer with the coolness of the nights. In addition, it has the capacity to regulate the humidity of the spaces and breathe. This is why earth is considered one of the healthiest materials for construction. Earth is compacted while wet, and when it dries, it achieves great resistance and hardness, which also protects it from rain and wind.

Earth is revalued through contact with waste management companies, with a clear commitment to circularity and low environmental impact. Moreover, it is mainly an unbaked material, thus saving energy and avoiding contamination. Finally, a prefabricated system is proposed to improve working conditions and have greater cost and timeline control when executing the project.

The commitment to prefabrication is crucial for updating traditional techniques, aware and responsible with the climatic context and local resources. Opting for the industrialization of earth has a primary goal: to make its qualities accessible to more people and to make the material a competitive alternative to current construction systems, both in terms of cost and construction speed. This will create a catalog of low-impact and healthy construction materials accessible to everyone.

why it’s important

The national and European environments are increasingly moving towards implementing regulations and guidelines that lead to low environmental impact, industrialized construction with products and materials that meet high circularity standards. In this present and near future, we see the opportunity to generate a product that will help make this transition to more environmentally conscious construction.

With the shared goal of contributing to the decarbonization of the construction sector and generating quality, decentralized jobs and services, the industrialization of compacted earth is an essential solution, as another great benefit of earth is its nearly zero CO2 emissions, a global goal to transition towards decarbonization through models, materials, systems, and technologies that can make us more resilient to future conditions, while considering low environmental impact and human health.

objectives

Our goal is to produce large-format prefabricated compacted earth. We have the expertise of a team that has been working with earth for over 20 years, studying its structural, biological, and environmental qualities, and developing a feasibility plan and business model that not only offers a healthy and safe product to the market but also generates a network of decentralized workplaces.

Now is the time to launch the project, and for that, we need to create the infrastructure, update construction regulations, and spread these new (or not so new) ways of building:

1—Low impact at affordable prices — Popularizing low environmental impact construction and disassociating sustainability from products accessible to a minority of society can be achieved through the industrialization of the system, reducing the manual labor required in the current process to obtain rammed earth elements and increasing its production.

2—Circularity — Ensuring that most of the raw material we use in construction comes from prior waste management instead of extracting materials. Removing the label of “waste” from earth and labeling it as “resource” is one of the social needs that our product aims to address.