En terre inconnue

Faced with climate upheaval, dominant industrial models and regulatory constraints, a marginal material resurfaces: excavated earth. Long treated as waste, it slips past set categories and disrupts standard narratives of construction. This thesis takes this unstable, often sidelined material as a starting point to question what its reintegration into architecture brings about. Through several projects by BC architects & studies and BC Materials, the aim is not to defend a solution, but to observe what earth does to practice. What it enables. What it hinders as well. Earth shifts between ecological ambition and on-site reality. It reveals paradoxes and exposes the limits of contemporary architecture. By focusing on these tensions, this work does not aim to fix a method, but to make a movement perceptible.