Office e.g.: Earthen Comforts—Airing Earth

Materials & Applications (M&A) presents Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth, a courtyard installation led by Liz Gálvez (Office e.g.) that stages mass and fiber as shared infrastructures for collective comfort in the Los Angeles summer. Building on the practice’s ongoing investigation into heat resilience and material experimentation by staging thermal infrastructures as architectural and civic propositions, the project adapts passive cooling strategies from desert contexts into the M&A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard.

Earthen thermal mass columns anchor the site, paired with a lightweight canopy that modulates shade, air movement, and light. The canopy, woven from nearly 17 miles of twisted cotton cord, is supported by a timber frame composed of standard dimensional lumber built up into structural members using low-cost, do-it-yourself mass-timber assembly techniques. These systems are not novel inventions but re-imagined inheritances: stone or earthen blocks, timber, and woven shade have long functioned as elemental infrastructures across cultures and climates. Recast in the courtyard, they compose an experimental ecology that makes heat’s stubborn but predictable movement legible. Visitors will encounter varied microclimates—cool, heavy earth; dappled woven shade; shifting breezes—that expand thermal design beyond mere survivability toward joy and collective participation in the face of intensifying heat.

Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth is a collaborative effort comprising design by Office e.g. & the (Im)material Matters Lab at UC Berkeley (Liz Gálvez with Ian Chu, Theint Lei, and Lincoln Ruiz-Truong); thermal consultation by Salmaan Craig; wood assembly consultation by Berkeley Wood Lab (Paul Mayencourt); structural engineering by Nous Engineering (Reyisha Mahemuti and Matthew Melnyk); adobe consultation by adobeisnotsoftware (Ben Loescher); commissioning and production by M&A (Kate Yeh Chiu with Hilary Huckins-Weidner, Michael Lagos, Austin Merchant, Aviva Rubin, Sara Suárez, and Leana Scott); fabrication by Cesar Franco with Jose Gonzales and David Perez, Noah Shipley, Alex Schwab, Pioneertown Adobe (Rex Edhlund), and numerous volunteer students and community members.

Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth is generously supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Pasadena Art Alliance, the University of California, Berkeley, Arts Research Center (ARC), and the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design.

The M&A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard is a partnership between Materials & Applications and Craft Contemporary. Each summer since 2021, M&A transforms Craft Contemporary’s courtyard into a venue grounded by a public work of experimental architecture. A series of summer events brings architects, artists, and storytellers together into dialogue, with renewed focus on urban environments and community engagement.