This bench and fire pit were completed during a month-long natural construction workshop at Arcosanti in central Arizona. Arcosanti is an experiment in new urbanism and ecological architecture founded by Paolo Soleri in the 1970s and built by volunteers over the next three decades. The site features an amphitheater, a ceramics studio, a foundry, and artists studios with residential units scattered throughout. While construction on the original site plans has been halted for over a decade, there’s a camping area by the river where experimental structures and gathering places for the community members are being built and updated.

The group of four workshop participants, including myself, designed and built this seating area to revitalize an abandoned site that used to have a sauna, bar, and a dwelling that burned down in a fire. After learning how to work with natural materials such as clay, rock, and reed to construct rock walls, cobb bricks, rammed earth, and reed screens, we drew designs of how to construct an architectural intervention through natural means.

The bench was built using materials that were sourced on site. First we gathered rocks and stacked them to create the general form and structure of the bench. We then tested different soil samples to find the right composition of sand and clay for a cobb mixture. After coating the seating area of the bench in cobb, we mixed a clay plaster for the final coat. I led the initiative to add pigment to the final coat and after testing different ochres, and flax seed pigment we chose a reddish rock that was ground into powder and added to the clay. To make the bench more water proof, we used a method called tadelakt, which involves spraying the clay plaster with an olive oil soap mixture, and burnishing the surface with smooth rocks to create a shiny finish.

The fire pit was built using a clay and sand mixture that we tamped down to create a rammed earth cylinder. The inside of the formwork was a metal barrel, and the outside was a sheet of metal that we wrapped to the right circumference and secured with straps. PVC pipes were built into the walls to provide oxygen for the fire.