Arch Daily rooted up a lovely little Truffle this week.  Duh, not the kind you eat, but a modest building project by Ensamble Studio in Spain.  I want to call it process architecture (though it’s not at all something Phillip Glass would think up) but given its gastronomic nomenclature, maybe we should call it slow architecture.  More or less, Ensamble dug a big hole in the ground for the building’s outer formwork and then, as they describe it:

We materialized the air building a volume with hay bales and flooded the space between the earth and the built air [with concrete] to solidify it. The poured mass concrete wrapped the air and protected itself with the ground.

In short, hay is used as the positive mold against which concrete is cast.

Once the concrete has fully entombed the hay, the outer dirt formwork is excavated away, and a quarry machine is brought onsite to excise one end of the mass to create and opening.  As the quarry machine leaves the site, a second machine arrives on site to remove the compressed, organic formwork from the now exposed interior: Paulina the cow.  Ensamble writes:

To empty the interior, the calf Paulina arrived, and enjoyed the 50 [cubic meters] of the nicest food, from which she nourished for a year until she left her habitat, already as an adult and weighing 300 kilos. She had eaten the interior volume, and space appeared for the first time, restoring the architectural condition of the truffle after having been a shelter for the animal and the vegetable mass for a long time.

They go on to become obsessed with the dense materiality of the edifice, waxing poetic about how the hay-formed concrete “contrasts with the continuous liquidity of the ceiling that evokes the sea, petrified in the lintel of the spatial frame.”  Yeah, fine, whatever…I’m more interested in the cow!

The scope of Ensamble’s diagrams are myopic.  What about the cow’s waste?  Is it a milk cow, or will she become the first meal served on Truffle’s table?  I won’t hold the oversight against them, because the expanding ecosystem of the building’s construction is so exciting.  Edible formwork, construction without waste, the construction site food web: the BLDGBLOG post nearly writes itself!

The Truffle brings to mind Australian architect Andrew Maynard’s Poop House.  If I recall correctly, Maynard proposes a kind of Quonset hut made of consecutive arches of double-walled polypropolyne bladders. The inner bladder is filled with fresh, potable water and the outer bladder is empty.  Overtime, the water in the walls is consumed by the house’s inhabitants, who in turn, produce poop.  The poop is pumped into the empty outer bladders where it hardens in the unforgiving Austrailian sun.  By the time all the water is consumed, the outer bladder has been filled with poop, now a hardened, durable building material.

The uncanny, sublime construction process in Ensamble’s Truffle and Maynard’s Poop House forgives any compromise that must be made on the building’s behalf.  In each, food plays an implicit role in the subtractive or additive narrative of its construction: the cow eats the hay formwork in one, while human waste becomes a building material in the other.  These buildings would like Michael Pollan happy: not only do they provide shelter, but the satisfying process of their construction satiates the mind.