Architect Liz Gálvez has completed Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth, an experimental pavilion for Materials & Applications and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles that demonstrates how traditional materials and passive design strategies can improve thermal comfort in urban environments.
Installed within the organisation’s shared courtyard, the temporary structure combines earthen blocks, timber construction and a woven canopy to investigate architecture’s role in climate adaptation while encouraging public engagement with outdoor space.
Earthen materials and woven canopy create varied microclimates
Stretching along one edge of the concrete courtyard, the pavilion consists of a timber post-and-beam framework topped by a layered canopy woven from white cord. The canopy incorporates varying rope densities to filter sunlight, while an open slot and a slightly elevated panel encourage natural airflow throughout the structure.
“Contemporary design culture continues to privilege mechanical conditioning as the default mode of environmental control, often at great ecological cost,” said Gálvez.
“Earthen Comforts reframes this paradigm by re-centring thermal design as an architectural and civic act, intervening in urgent debates around climate adaptation, material practice, and collective life.”
Inside the pavilion, stacked columns of earthen blocks line the timber supports, helping anchor the structure while also serving as informal seating. Together with the woven canopy, the materials generate a series of distinct thermal conditions that respond to changing light, shade and airflow during the day.
“The pavilion features materials and systems that are not novel,” the project team explained, describing them instead as approaches that have been reinterpreted for a contemporary urban setting.
Pavilion examines architecture’s role in climate adaptation
Rather than relying on mechanical cooling, Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth uses passive environmental design to create comfortable outdoor conditions through material performance and natural ventilation.
“Visitors will encounter varied microclimates cool, heavy earth; dappled woven shade; shifting breezes – that expand thermal design beyond mere survivability toward joy and collective participation in the face of intensifying heat,” said the team.
The installation builds on research conducted by Gálvez, her practice Office eg, and the (Im)material Matters Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where she serves as founder and director. Her ongoing work explores how timber construction, earthen materials and woven textiles can support low-energy approaches to thermal comfort in response to rising global temperatures.
The pavilion continues the annual collaboration between Materials & Applications and Craft Contemporary, which has commissioned experimental architectural installations for the courtyard each summer since 2021. Through this latest intervention, the organisations highlight the potential of passive cooling, sustainable materials and climate-responsive architecture to reshape public space in increasingly hot cities.