09/01/2025
Our modern society is used to readymade building products to a point where we have lost all the traditional knowledge and the techniques our ancestors have gathered for millennia. But in the not so far past, every mason was able to prepare his own plaster mixes from cheap and accessible ingredients: local sands, earths, lime, pigments, plant fibers…
When my Greek colleague Apostolos Mousourakis from the natural building association “Piliko” called me and invited me to Greece, together with three other colleagues from “Craterre”, to give to the young Greek architects an insight of earth plasters work, I found the idea excellent!
At the end of September 2024, the small city of Filiatra hosted a 4 days’ workshop and seminar on natural building. Fifteen participants were present and our work consisted in producing demonstration panels with only the locally available earths and sands and some other natural ingredients as reeds, straw and molded olive pits…
We took pleasure to first assemble wooden frames and then to fill them with different earthen plastering mixtures. We then went to the local museum in search of inspiration from the traditional Greek motives. The students imagined a stylized simple motif running across all the panels which we realized with colored plaster mixtures. The end result of our work was installed as a welcoming panel at the entrance of the regional history museum. All the participants were able to experiment different mixtures, textures and finishing techniques. I hope they will all have the opportunity to practice at a bigger scale pretty soon…