 My name is Lilitha Nenon, and I'm an assistant professor at Columbia GSAP, where I directed natural materials lab and also the building technology for Rick Nenon, and my main expertise is in natural, raw, non-treated, non-calculated, non-heated building materials, their life cycles, production systems, policy, and specifically the use of earth and vegetable fibers and construction buildings. There is a momentum now for sure in the past decade or so for bringing back these materials and trying to, of course, given the environmental and social emergencies, devise strategies to re-inform these materials in mainstream construction. Earth materials that are not castrated or stabilized or heated can last almost forever while being maintained. So as long as they are maintained, they last. Once we don't maintain them, once we are maybe, you know, not in need anymore for a shelter, not occupying shelters on the planet anymore, then these materials can go back as a soil nutrition, as a nutrition for the land. So I think that what geo-materials teach us is that there is no homogeneity really. There is a heterogeneity, there is a variant, there is a material variability that is inherent in natural materials, but actually in all materials around us and it's striving to have something that is sterile, that is homogeneous, it's just, you know, a bug we have in the system of perfection's impossibility. So that is what Earth materials continuously teach me, is how materials can be disobedient, how they can be porous, how they can be reacting differently and different constituency and different mixed designs. The main method for deriving this question or this notion is by using these materials with our bare hands. So there's a law in our lab, the only law is that we do not use material we don't want to mix with our bare hands. So even lime as a binder, which is considered a natural relatively low carbon binder, is not something we tend to use just because it's sometimes going to be nasty on our hands. So that will be the main focus, working with the material, with our hands, with our bodies, and using the material specifically in the natural materials lab, we're looking at three strains of making or creating with geobiomaterials. One is by digital fabrication or printing, so working with the machine to create some little accuracy. The second is mechanical compression, so whether into bricks or tiles or forms, earth and geobiomaterials are materials that like to be pressed. And the third strain is manual craft, so weaving, creating textiles and really sculpting the material. One thing that we're going to do this spring in Paris, we're going to engage our three layers of the local soils combined with fibers with different pigments to then create a map or a pattern that reflects on the nature of. So it's going to be a site-specific installation and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. So we are looking at different modes of traditional techniques. My, not related to my maybe scholarship, but I use soil a lot making smaller scale artifacts. It's a way for me to maybe contemplate with the material to understand how different mixtures can add and apply for their sculptable abilities. But aside from that, everything that we do is essentially not new. Maybe the 3D printed or digital fabrication stuff, but that as well can be seen in different ways of either pottery practices or earth bag or earth layering practices in Iran, for instance. So you can trace back how these modes of assembly have been used, maybe not a bunch generally, but there are these interesting references to how these materials were used in the past. So it's such a variable material that ranges from one edge of one side of the construction site to another side of the construction site. So by itself is inherently variable, different, changing, non-consistent. And you know, sometimes they'll work with soil and it will not work. And I'll try and try and try and add and change and more plastic size with water, less plastic, more fiber, less fiber. And then someone will come to me with, look at this amazing mud we found for you. Well, that's because everyone knows now that if they find nice mud, they need to let me know. And suddenly it will work. The franking will work. The sculpture piece will be easier to work with it because it's the right type of soil. So I keep reminding myself that if something is not working for me, I need to go back, test the amount of clay in the soil, maybe different clays will also react or behave differently. So if it's a kaolin based of clay-rich soil, it will behave differently from a bentonite-rich clay-rich soil. It's really the type of clay and the particle size distribution. So a very silky soil will be very, very greasy. With time I developed the felt sense of differentiating between clay soil and clay silky, low soil. So then I learned that the silk will not be sticky, but it will be greasy if that makes sense. Similar to that, sometimes when I have too much clay in my soil, I need sand. So I learned different techniques to listen to the sand. So I'll pick the sand and I'll crunch it near my ear to listen to if it's crunchy enough. I know that it's jagged and I will know that it will have enough surface area to capture the clay in the soil and the mixture between that sand and the clay-rich soil will be great. If you're a chef and you're developing a recipe for a cookie, you want to create the most high-performance cookie, then you look at the ingredients and it will be the binder, the flour, maybe the aggregate, the baking powder will be the bi-additive that makes the chemical reaction. Very similar to that is how we treat building materials and how we should start looking at building materials that are not only be engaging, but can also be healthy food grade building materials. So similar to what we eat or what we consume affects our body and affects our health. Very similar to that, the buildings that surround us with the finishes mostly that surround us in the built environment affect our health through either inhalation or thermal exchange to ingestion. We are continuously in exchange with our built environment so we might as well think about building materials that we are feeling or we can consume or in secondary consumption or non-direct consumption and also building materials that just for a substance add to our bio. So two things we should do with new materials, whether they are made of earth fibers or other next-gen non-dimensional materials, material materials, fungi-based is we need to check their thermal or characterize their thermal possibilities in different climates and we need to understand their microstructure. And for these two kind of aspirations I feel that the Historic Preservation Lab has been really influential and important. This is for instance the thermal camera we used for looking or testing or evaluating the thermal capacity or storage of earth materials specifically earth chases or chairs or sitting modalities and their ability to store heat that is pumped from heat rings or heat wires that can then be transferred in a conductive way immediately to the user. And you can see in the images that we created a chase made from a bamboo skeleton light chocolate tissue, a clay plaster, and those heat things that pumped the heat into the chase. And you can see in the thermal camera images how the heat is then transferred to the user, to the model, by the way mentioned that it was like sitting on a piece of land that was warmed by the sun. I always recommend my students to go to workshops, to go to hands-on workshops and there's like if you google calm, clay plaster, rubbed earth, workshop, you'll find these kind of engagements all around the world, northeast US to you know Thailand. So really going to workshops is a really great technique to learn more about the materials and what did that mean. I would recommend for students to really not shy away from using new materials, ditch the foam, ditch the the rock height, and use materials that can be found in their immediate nature or in the backyards if they are you know not in the middle of New York City and really use these materialities to examine their strength, their durability, their workability, and develop their own kind of mixtures or recipes for using a range of geofiber additive materials. So from using subsoil, some shredded dry tomato stocks, and aloe vera juice, you can create such an amazing material that aloe vera will act as the biobounder, as the biopolymer. Everything that is gooey is a great finder. The fiber, the dry fibers will act as a reinforcement, and the clay in the subsoil will create this kind of homogeneity, but maybe the binding of that mixes on it. So really learning what we have in our immediate nature, how we can use it is something I would recommend every student to investigate.