ArchDaily’s Monthly Topic: Local Materials

Local Materials. A selection of articles, interviews and projects. [View it in your browser]( MONTHLY TOPIC: Conversations about sustainability, a term that has somewhat become exhausted over the years, initiated new questions and movements about how we build and what we build with. International exhibitions such as this year’s Venice Biennale, presented experimental solutions to the critical environmental impact of the construction industry - solutions that have one factor in common: local sourcing, whether it being materials or building techniques. The UAE pavilion, winner of the 2021 Golden Lion Award, explored sea salt as a traditional, locally-sourced building material and its potential uses for developing sustainable habitation in desert environments like the UAE. August at ArchDaily was all about taking advantage of local materials and exploring their potential in the fields of architecture and design through in-depth articles, interviews, and study cases from projects built across the world, looking beyond locality as a solution to achieve sustainability, and seeing it as a means of empowering local communities as well. [SEE MORE »]( Material Passports: How Embedded Data Can Rethink Architecture and Design Too often buildings end up as waste at the end of their lifecycle. How can the built environment move towards a circular economy, and in turn, reimagine how valuable materials are tracked and recycled? Looking to address this issue, material passports are one idea that involves rethinking how materials are recovered during renovation and demolition for reuse. The result is when a building is ready to be demolished, it becomes a storage bank for useful materials. [Read More »]( Re-evaluating Critical Regionalism: An Architecture of the Place In his 1983 now-classic essay Towards a Critical Regionalism, Six Points of an Architecture of Resistance, Kenneth Frampton discussed an alternative approach to architecture, one defined by climate, topography and tectonics, as a form of resistance to the placeness of Modern Architecture and the gratuitous ornamentation of Postmodernism. An architectural attitude, Critical Regionalism proposed an architecture that would embrace global influences while firmly rooted in its context. The following explores the value and contribution of Frampton’s ideas for contemporary architecture. [Read More »]( Locality, Legality, and Limiting Landscapes: The Story Behind Switzerland’s Villa Vals The rustic village of Vals in the Swiss Alps is one of the country’s most picturesque areas, located at an altitude of 1250 meters above sea level with numerous exceptional projects. The main square is surrounded by original Vals houses roofed with stone tiles made of Vals quartzite. Throughout the years, the village maintained its authentic residential and rural typology, making sure that its agriculture and rural fabric remained intact. [Read More »]( Is It Possible to Mix Local Materials and 3D Printing? The art of building a shelter made from blocks of ice is passed on from father to son among the Inuit, native peoples who inhabit the northernmost regions of the planet. The circular plan, the entrance tunnel, the air outlet and the ice blocks form a structure where the heat generated inside melts a superficial layer of snow and seals the gaps, improving the thermal insulation of ice. In a storm, an igloo can be the difference between life and death and perhaps this is the most iconic and radical example of what it means to build with local materials, few tools and lots of knowledge. In this case, ice is all you have. [Read More »]( Towards a Sustainable Future: Local Materials and Methods in Contemporary Chinese Architecture Over the course of the last decade there has been a growing interest in the handcrafted buildings, as well as in the application of local and renewable materials in building construction. Under the concerns about the heavy environmental and economic expenses caused by construction, nowadays urban planners are embracing the concept of sustainability, which refers to “meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. [Read More »]( ArchDaily’s upcoming Monthly Topics: -Equity -Adaptive Reuse -New Practices If you’d like to submit content related to these themes, [send us a message](. 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