Lehmag

Felix Hilgert

Lukas Baumann

Employed February -August

Year: 2022

Colective:Lehmag & Buch und partner

Place: ST. Moritz

State: Built.

Budget:

Area: 40m2

Time: 45 Days

People:5

Lessons: The project presents itself early on as a challenge. The 25 cm walls with stabilized earth at 4% were built up to 4 meters high.

For safety reasons we placed nets every two layers and reinforced the wall with folded and interlaced 10 mm stainless steel bars.

I was mostly responsible for framing and thinking the project’s encofrados, while the rest of the team was responsible for compaction and soil preparation.

No one knew if we would be able to build under these conditions and on a roof. The stairs were entirely built in earth and the handrail was designed in earth which also allowed us to experiment with building a diagonal wall

Archivolte

Laurent Petrone

Mission March/Mai

Year: 2022

Colective: Archivolte

Place: Ville Franche Sur Saône.

State: Built.

Budget:

Area: 900 m2

Time: 8 months

People:13

Lessons: Earth construction processes are still too slow and costly to compete directly with industrial and cement construction.

Yet for political, social and ecological reasons the French public market is willing to provide the necessary funding to execute public works on unstabilized earth.

Atelier Archivolte led by Laurent Petrone, architect/ artisan, accepted the challenge to build a school of 800 m2. The most challenging aspect of this project is to keep the machine running. The tasks set were interconnected and mutually dependent on each other. Keeping this gear running was more central and challenging than the execution of the tasks themselves, and the team adapted the tasks so that everyone could work.

Cabestan Romain Charbonnel

Learn-by-doing cooperation.

Year: 2021

Colective: Cabestan

Place:Vatilieu. France.

State: Built.

Budget:

Area:

Time: 2 Days

People:4

Lessons: Raw compacted earth blocks are an excellent substitute for bricks and concrete bricks.

Despite their weight, they are extremely malleable as quick cuts can easily be made. Extraction/ production is less than 40km from the site and the carbon footprint of their production is extremely low. This is not the only extraction in the area, there are several which makes this material and the associated techniques a possible solution to traditional masonry.

Timur Ersen & Dorsaz Emmanuel Atelier Kara

Poured Earth Construction. (Pisé)

Year: 2021

Colective: Atelier Kara

Place: Paris. France.

State: Built.

Budget:

Area: 250 m 2

Time: 22 Days

People:13

Lessons: The masonry construction process linked to pise is a living technique in full evolution. It is a work that demands a lot of physical effort and a lot of knowledge about a living and breathing matter. This project allowed me to closely observe all the fundamental cleverness to coherently execute this technique of great physical demands. The work was organised in a chain. Everyone had to move at the same speed, work simultaneously, and stop at the same time. There is a real team spirit at work. Everything is done mechanically. There are no machines associated with the assembly and construction process.

Staircase III Tree House

Based on the previous wood stairs, the details were adapted to better respond to the natural context.

Year: 2019

Colective: Own authorship.

Place: Charnecle. France.

State: Built

Budget: 200 €

Time: 3 Days.

People: 2

Lesson: This project was the solution for the context and challenges encountered in the previous stair. It maintains the will of the former details relatively to endurance to rain and sun. With the right tools we were able to rapidly weld, bend and drill the metal. It was faster and simpler. Constructively the detail allowed us to save in wood simplifying the assemble of parts: The challenge for the future is to engage and mix metal techniques with workshops.

Tavaillon. Tree House

Workshop. A Team of students was invited to create a roof with the technique of ‘‘tavaillon’’, wood framing.

Year: 2019

Colective: Own authorship.

Place: Rapa, Portugal.

State: Built.

Budget: 300 €

Area: 10 m2

Time: 2 Days.

People: 6

Lesson: In search of details and techniques that permitted multiple tasking and collective work we encountered the ‘‘tavaillon’’ technique. This detail permits that with simple assemble of wooden boards the roof or façade can be easily shielded from rain. Thanks to a subdivision of simple tasks and a carefully planned work strategy , there was enough work for the number of students invited. The wood was burnt and brushed covering the pores of the wood. Dry wood was purposely selected speeding up the burning process and saving money in gas.

Staircase I

The Stairs. Depending on recicled material, I was challenged to create two metal stairs in a terrain full of terraces, allowing a faster displacement.

Year:2020

Colective: Vincent Gontier.

Place: Charnècle. France

State: Built

Budget: 30 €

Time: 7 Days.

People: 1

Lesson:If you work alone every task can be a challenge. The project was almost fully made with recycled materials so the sections of the metal are exaggerated, but the budget was low. The sections of the metal made every piece heavier than what I could manage alone. So, Installation was a challenge. To construct I only needed two days, but five days for installation. This is the lesson. In the future when working and organizing collective workshops, the weight and the construction work are crucial parts for the process. Details must react to this condition.

Mezzanine I

We were requested to design and build a space able to support 5T of weight, andat the same time leaving the front façade open. The solution was a system of chains, transferring the weight to the rooftop. The project was fully built with reused materials.

Year: 2020

Colective: Vincent Gontier.

Place: Charnècle. France

State: Built

Budget: 0 €

Time: 5 Days.

People: 2

Lesson: The sculptor and the architect have two different ways off seeing measures. For Vincent half a millimiter is a crucial error. The shock between the scale of the architect and the sculptor, allowed me to escape from a dependence of ‘‘in situ’’ construction. Everything was made in the studio. Here we can see how the mixture of the structural knowledge of the architect and the material handling of the sculptor created a fast and unique job.

Mezzanine II

The Mezzanine. The project was fully built with reused materials. The wood beams came from a constrution site nearby: The metal was the remains of other works. This came perfectly with the context, since the ‘‘client’’ didn’t had enough to pay for the construction materials.

Year: 2020

Colective: Vincent Gontier.

Place: Charnècle. France

State: Under Constrcution

Budget: 0 €

Time: 4 Days.

People: 2

Lesson: The location, an old garage, didn’t have a single straight surface. We could not trust in the ancient walls. For this reason, we adapted every single pillar to every single wall. This experience permitted me to engage with a professional incremental process where nothing was made in site but measured and created in studio. Surprisingly, designing and constructing every single pillar differently didn’t take more time. From now on, pre-existence will not be an unsurpassable task but a challenge.

The Wall I

On a first experience working with FPC in Paris, I was demanded to assemble a metal mechanic structure. The four elements should create a barrier and a protection for the stairs. The structure should be composed of different pieces, a fundamental necessity, allowing the team to construct the structure in studio and at the same time allowing access by the front door. Since the dimension of the apartment was small, visually speaking the client wanted a permeable materiality. Our option was then a metal grill with welding points completely exposed. The challenge of this project was the creation of this welding points that generated the assembly strength and at the same time, were as invisible has they could be.

Year: 2020

Colective: FPC

Place: Paris. France.

State: Installed

Budget: 0 €

Time: 5 Days.

People: 2

The Wall II

The second experience with FPC was a private demand to construct a metal façade, an interior division wall that would separate chamber and living room. The repetition of the elements permitted the team to work with Templates, ad also to organize the work mechanically. All welding lines were made at 45º metal assembles. The voids were filled with glass on the top and plywood white boars on the bottom. They were placed with a second metal structure that pressured these elements. The challenge of this project was to perfectly calculate the drilling points of the two different Metal profiles, not forgetting the thickness of all elements (glass, protection sponge, painting, washer), and the space needed for the tolls (wrench and screwdriver.

Year: 2020

Colective: FPC

Place: Paris. France.

State: Installed

Budget: 800 €

Time: 10 Days.

People: 2

Metal Props I

As we can see in the last picture, the project is almost invisible after its installation and use. So the interesting part of this project its is mechanical system that creates. By fixing up in two static points (the floor and the ceiling), the third element (a screw nut) creates the needed pressure between the two elements two create a rigid structure. As a dynamic element, the screw nut transforms the structure into a metal prop, an adjustable column.

Year: 2020

Colective: Vincent Gontier.

Place: Charnècle. France.

State: Under Constrcution

Budget: 0 €

Time: 2 Days.

People: 2

Sliding door Closet I

Before starting the project, we already knew all the elements that we wanted to store in the closet. For this reason the form of the closet was defined by the size of the elements. The challenge has usual with Vincent was to create a metal structure that supported itself in an ancient “Taipa” Wall, with strong oscillations. The challenge was then in the measuring process. By using two guiding lasers we were able to measure with precision the distance of every point and to construct every piece in studio.

Year: 2020

Colective: Vincent Gontier.

Place: Charnècle. France

State: Under Constrcution

Budget: 400 €

Time: 4 Days.

People: 2

Shelf I

The Mezzanine. The project was fully built with reused materials. The wood beams came from a constrution site nearby: The metal was the remains of other works. This came perfectly with the context, since the ‘‘client’’ didn’t had enough to pay for the construction materials.

Year: 2020

Colective: Vincent Gontier.

Place: Charnècle. France

State: Installed

Budget: 100 €

Time: 2 Days.

People: 2

Lesson: The location, an old garage, didn’t have a single straight surface. We could not trust in the ancient walls. For this reason, we adapted every single pillar to every single wall. This experience permitted me to engage with a professional incremental process where nothing was made in site but measured and created in studio. Surprisingly, designing and constructing every single pillar differently didn’t take more time. From now on, pre-existence will not be an unsurpassable task but a challenge.

The Table.

On demand of the client We designed and built a ‘‘mecano’’ table, prioritizing an easy assemble.

Year: 2020

Colective: Vincent Gontier.

Place: Charnècle. France

State: Built

Budget: 0 €

Dimension: 100cmx 80cm

Time: 5 Days.

People: 2

Lesson: Creativity has no limits, but even so we are attached to a economical condition. To survive every action must try to maintain its economic sustainability. Even if this project was made only with recycled materials, the profit (€400) is insufficient for the task, or in other words the project didn’t adapt to the monetary conditions… Time is one of the most fundamental resources:Time was not prioritized, and the detailing process advanced to a complex system. In the future I want to engage with scarcity, so simplicity of process must be perfectly present or else, we will accumulate pressure in the construction process.