Features and seminars

Building with Minerals and Fibers

Jan Nauta - Studio Nauta

What if we use wood for the construction of buildings, bio-based crops for their insulation and rammed earth for the mass? Then we can rely on forestry for construction, on agriculture for insulation and on earth for the mass. Studio Nauta works towards this in their projects.

The office is working on ever larger projects in wood, and the realization of a rammed earth bathhouse in Arnhem stimulated the office to investigate the next step together with Mulder Zonderland through a competition in Zwolle: is it possible to replace the concrete floors between apartments with floors in which prefab rammed earth elements are clamped between wooden beams?

The most sustainable way of building is of course adaptive reuse of existing buildings. In every assignment, the office therefore tries to preserve as many existing buildings as possible. In Gouda, together with Joost Emmerik and Mulder Zonderland, it designed a residential building on top of a bunker from the Cold War era. On the same site, the office managed to save an old office building from demolition – now it is being transformed into a residential building. And in Dordrecht, the office managed to convince a school not to demolish their building, but to thoroughly renovate it and strategically expand it.

Seminar in Dutch

Picture: © Ari Versluis

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