Kijken in de grond

A building block, a cultural biography of the landscape and a craft

While the connection between these three elements may not be obvious at first, this unusual combination gives us the opportunity to learn a new way of looking at the world around us. We are creating a series of portraits of the Dutch soil using a geological map of the Netherlands. The form: wind-dried compressed earth blocks. You may find the materials to make blocks like these in your back garden, or perhaps on the floodplain of a nearby river or a natural rise in the landscape. You can even make them yourself. They are not fired in a kiln but compressed and dried in the wind. They can be made using just 1% of the energy required to produce fired bricks and they are 100% circular. As we travel across the Netherlands looking for locations with soil suitable for making these blocks, we often wonder about the stories behind the landscape. Once we have found a suitable location, each block we make is unique, thanks to the combination of the local earth, plant-based structure and local minerals. The goal is not so much to develop a product, but rather to create awareness of the relationship between cultures, landscapes and ecological materials.