Gallery / Featured Work / AREA

AREA (Activism, Research, Experimentation and Architecture) is a summer research+build workshop that engaged a 90 year old abandoned mud-brick building, located in the town of Marfa, Texas, as the testing grounds for questioning the notion of detail, the theme of this summer’s inquiry. Through a series of explorations that examined the process of making and unmaking in architecture, students designed and built full-scale interventions that responded to a critical examination of place and program while addressing local/global and industrial/non-industrial agendas for architecture by employing raw earth as the primary building material in these investigations. Marfa served as an ideal laboratory from where to study these issues. It is a town constructed almost entirely from mud-brick and transformed by rich historical, cultural and geographic forces. At 5,000 feet above sea level, it is one of the oldest cultivated areas in the United States. Located 60 miles from the U.S./Mexico border, Marfa is also home to the Chinati Foundation, an internationally renowned contemporary art museum, founded by Donald Judd, whose emphasis is on works in which art and the surrounding landscape are inextricably linked. Participants had the opportunity to visit this extraordinary cultural and geographic landscape through a series of directed and self-guided field-studies to Chihuahua, Mexico, Big Bend National Park, Texas and the Paquime Ruins National Monument, Mexico. AREA was an initiative of the School of Architecture at Clemson University and made possible in part by the Adobe Alliance, a non-profit organization committed to the dissemination of traditional earth building technologies. For more information visit the AREA website or contact AREA Director Professor Ronald Rael at rrael@clemson.edu