Clay Together

​Keeping warm has always been a communal practice. In old times, people huddled with animals at night to maintain warmth, but it is difficult to argue that modern heating systems have the same socialising effect as earlier forms of heating. How communal is a radiator?

Clay Together aims to improve energy efficiency and transform urban spaces by utilising passive and thermal design. Focusing on building thermoregulation, community factors, and converting unused spaces into communal areas, it argues that we can create environmentally responsible and collaborative environments – as long as we accept some compromise, that is. The project rethinks a set of semi-detached houses as shared residential environments where cooperation among residents materialises in the form of a sequence of spaces that allow for gradient heating. Clay moulds onto the original structures to give new shape to one of the most typical residential types in the city and turn it into a domestic space catered for differential conceptions of comfort.