For the trio behind Material Cultures, being an architect is no white-collar job – despite what the construction industry of the last century would have you believe. Founders Paloma Gormley, George Massoud and Summer Islam spend more time in wellies, roaming forests, marshlands and muddy building sites, than they do in starched shirts sitting behind desks. On a recent trip to Germany, Paloma even found herself driving through a bog on a snowplough that had been reimagined as a harvester for thatching reeds.
It is all in a day’s work for the team, whose goal is to scale up construction with biomaterials and drive progress towards a post-carbon built environment. ‘We want to bring architecture and the land closer,’ says Summer, of the not-for-profit organisation. From reeds and hemp to wood and unfired clay, they work with natural materials that can be returned to the earth at the end of their lifespan – unlike the petrochemical-derived products that create ‘toxic environments for those that build and live in them’, as Paloma puts it. Material Cultures transforms these materials into construction systems for innovative houses, community centres and housing developments.
The company has built prefab houses from timber and hempcrete – a mixture of hemp shivs, water and lime – such as Flat House, the home of film director Steve Barron on his Cambridgeshire hemp farm (featured in House & Garden’s June 2023 issue). Straw bales, lightweight timber and clay are the order of the day at the Wolves Lane horticultural centre, now nearing completion in Haringey, N22.
Running in parallel, Material Cultures’ research arm goes back to the roots of each material, looking at how it can be farmed in a way that regenerates nature. ‘Our role as a practice is to see how we can bring about a cultural shift,’ explains Paloma. Her trip through the bogs of Berlin/Brandenburg in Germany, for example, was part of a project funded by Bauhaus Earth and the Experimental foundation to establish how paludiculture (wetland farming) could offer a source of renewable building materials while regenerating the peatlands, which are vital carbon sinks.
‘We’re now exploring the structural capacities of reeds and developing a thatched cladding system that could be used on some of our residential projects,’ adds Summer. Bundles of the dried plants fill corners of their east London studio, while cladding tests and clay plaster experiments line the shelves.
The trio had been working as separate practices – George and Summer as Studio Abroad, and Paloma as part of Practice Architecture – before they teamed up, though their previous firms did share an office and they had supported each other on various projects. As a result, they cannot pinpoint their first Material Cultures venture, but the studio solidified during the pandemic.
‘We share an enthusiasm for the act of making a building and being as close to the materials as possible – something that is lacking in our current construction system, where contracts put you at arm’s length from your builders,’ Summer explains. ‘You can read this in the materials of our cities – you think you’re looking at a brick building, but actually it’s brick slip or, worse, printed bricks.’
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Material Cultures wants to close that gap, making a structure’s material palette more legible and demystifying the construction process so people can maintain their own buildings. At Wolves Lane, for example, the firm brought in a straw-building specialist to train the contractors, as well as local apprentices and volunteers. ‘It’s important to embed skills in the community,’ says Paloma.
Straw bales for the Wolves Lane buildings – housing a community hall, classroom, offices and distribution shed, all focused around food production – are sourced from the edge of London, while the clay for the rendering is from the site itself. Should it need repairing in future, local hands can make good any cracks.
As the team points out, there is a danger of encouraging mono-cultures in a switch to natural materials. ‘Bringing back diversity to farming and forestry is vital for climate resilience,’ George asserts. ‘That means diversifying our material palettes, too.’
In Yorkshire’s Dalby Forest, they joined forces with students of Central Saint Martins to build a classroom in the trees using timbers that ‘explicitly talk about the resilience of our woodlands’, says George. The building, Clearfell House, is made from ash and larch – both affected by disease in the UK, exacerbated by warming climates – limiting the lengths of timbers to what can be grown here, rather than importing wood.
Research and private commissions go hand-in-hand for the studio, which is putting its explorations into UK forestry and sustainable construction into practice in Norfolk. The trio are orchestrating a series of forest dwellings, built by practices including Mole Architects, Denizen Works, and themselves. These rural idylls will comprise a patchwork of different timbers.
Wood is also playing a starring role in their restoration of a stone steading on the Isle of Bute, while in Lewes, East Sussex, it will provide the framework for their biggest residential project yet: three buildings comprising around 70 homes as part of The Phoenix, set to be the UK’s largest timber neighbourhood. ‘What’s exciting is the building system is a multi-storey iteration of what we’ve used for residential projects, including Flat House,’ says Summer. It includes timber cassettes filled with an insulating hemp and lime mix.
Fast-growing plants like hemp and reeds devour high levels of carbon, meaning our neighbourhoods could be locking away carbon in the future. Material Cultures is here to catalyse that shift.
