AJ Climate Champions podcast: Why earth is the ultimate circular material

To achieve replication at scale, Nicolas Coeckelberghs of Brussels-based BC Materials favours compressed earth blocks over rammed earth

‘Our goal is to bring earthen construction from a niche to a growing market,’ says Coeckelberghs. He likens this challenge to playing chess on multiple fronts, creating demand while simultaneously supplying the market. While acknowledging the aesthetic appeal of rammed earth, Nicolas cautions that it is technically complex and unaffordable at scale.

In this episode, Nicolas describes BC Architects’ 15-year trajectory from its first earth building in Burundi, to the proliferation of collaborative workshops which led to a strand of consultancy work, to the creation of cooperative BC Materials in 2018. This led in turn to the recent launch of Léém, a manufacturing company that produces circular materials: unfired bricks, and clay plasters and paints.

While Nicolas is an innovator, he is also pragmatic and advocates focusing on easy wins. ‘Don’t use earth to make façades; just use it to make structures inside,’ he says. He sees enormous scope for application of earth blocks internally, where they are protected from the weather, and hence last longer.

In search of a way to scale the earth blocks production, BC Materials visited concrete and brick manufacturers across Belgium to understand their manufacturing techniques and explore possibilities for collaboration. Partnerships with large manufacturers are now under way, and BC Materials produces its blocks through ‘industrial co-working’, using the larger plants’ production lines during their ‘off’ hours.

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About Nicolas Coeckelberghs

After completing his architecture degree in Brussels, Nicolas co-founded BC materials with three fellow graduates in 2012. An early transformative project took the practice to Burundi where they learned the basics of earthen construction. Nicolas went on to do a Masters in earthen architecture at CRAterre in Grenoble, France.

Returning to Belgium, the practice explored ways to adapt earthen construction to Europe through a combination of architectural design, exploratory workshops and consultancy.

In 2018, the practice launched BC materials, a cooperative dedicated to manufacturing earth-based products. BC materials has earned a reputation for pushing the boundaries of bio-sourced, geopsourced and urban-sourced materials, in particular transforming excavated site materials into unfired building materials. Notable projects include Le Magasin Electrique for LUMA Arles and the Ghent Design Museum with Carmody Groarke. Nicolas describes these as ‘bullseye’ projects, because they incorporate all three strands of BC’s work: design, research and manufacturing.