Earth Architecture Workshop
Participatory workshop on traditional building materials, presentation and observational walks of local architecture.
Facilitated by Jelica Jovanović (architect)
Saturday, 17 June 2023, 12 to 6 p.m.
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS Coordinates
The earth architecture workshop is organized in the framework of ABC project to facilitate an exchange of knowledge and skills related to the possibilities of using traditional building materials and techniques and local material resources through a sustainable and ethical practice. With hands-on activities of preparing, mixing and testing earth materials (mud plasters, mortars, adobe and hybrid construction techniques), along with discussions and walks in the nearby area, the workshop is intended to create a space for sharing technical knowledge, experiences, and working possibilities, drawing from the work of The Summer School of Architecture in Rogljevo and the plan of building the Experimental Station. The Summer School is an informal alternative educational platform developed in 2010 by Jelica Jovanović and the Group of Architects (GA) to restore and preserve cultural assets (wine cellars) in Serbia together with the involvement of a group of students and with the active cooperation of the local community.
Workshop Program:
- introductory lecture on earth as a construction material
- presentation of The Summer School of Architecture
- lunch (prepared together)
- preparing the earth for the tests
- a walk around the village, looking at the local architecture
- testing the earth: making the adobe, bricks, mortars/plaster
- conclusions and wrap up
Participation in the workshop does not require any previous knowledge on earth architecture. We recommend bringing sun protection and work clothes.
We have limited seats available for organised transportation from Bucharest.
Jelica Jovanović is an architect, architectural historian and a PhD student of architectural preservation at the University of Technology in Vienna. She collaborated on projects Unfinished Modernisations: Between Utopia and Pragmatism (2010-2012) and (In)appropriate monuments (2015-2017), as well as the evaluation of New Belgrade’s Central Zone and Experimental Blocks 1 and 2. She was a curatorial advisor of the exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2018-2019). Within Docomomo Serbia she edited the Register of Modern Architecture and Urbanism in Serbia 1945-1990 (2018) and the Typology Atlas: Housing. Residential Neighborhoods, Blocks, Conglomerates, Sites 1945-1990 (2020), coordinated the documentation and coauthored the projects Virtual Library (from 2014) and Arhiva modernizma (from 2018). Within Grupa arhitekata NGO she organizes Summer Schools of Architecture in Rogljevo and Bač from 2010, with a focus on preservation of vernacular architecture. She is a member of the international platform As You Go… She coauthored the book Bogdan Bogdanović Biblioteka Beograd, an Architect’s Library (Fotohof, Salzburg, 2019).
The Summer School of Architecture in Rogljevo is organized in cooperation between the Group of Architects (GA) and Regional Restoration Camps (by Cultural Heritage Without Borders – Albania) as a continuation of activities in the field of informal education in architecture. The school is an active platform for improving theoretical and practical knowledge in the field of planning, designing and implementing the projects for the protection of architectural heritage, particularly in the wine cellars of Rogljevo, Rajac and Smedovac.
Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture [ABC]. Building ecological institutions for culture is an European cooperation project situated at the intersection between cultural practices, eco-architecture and ecosystems preservation. Initiated by a consortium of organisations active in the fields of culture, contemporary art, architecture, civic activism and eco-sustainable community practices, the project proposes a participatory process of building and cultural contextualising of ecological prototypes to be used by cultural institutions. ABC operates on four sites in Romania, Bulgaria and France: Silistea Snagovului, a village in the proximity of Bucharest, near a protected area of lake and forest; Brezoi, a small town in the South-Western part of Romania, in a mountaneous area and close to an important river; Dren, a village outside of Sofia, in a hilly area; and Bagneux, in the peripheral neighourhoods of Paris.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
