“My beginning in this life was in nature,” Lia Albejante says, her voice lilting through the phone. In her earliest years, she lived in a small village along a river bordering Brazil and Bolivia. Nature was everywhere, but roads were not—if you wanted to leave, you were going by boat. At three years old, her parents moved to the countryside near São Paulo, an area that was still connected to nature albeit slightly less remote. Then, at 18, she finally left for the city to attend university before traveling abroad.

Lia is a psychologist who emphasizes the therapeutic use of psychedelics, particularly psilocybin and DMT. As her work and life progressed, living in nature became increasingly important. “What is outside is inside. So when we see what we are doing with our planet, it’s also what we are doing to our bodies,” she says. “In my work as a psychologist, one of my goals is to connect people to art, their bodies, and nature. And I think by living in nature, I’m able to learn more about this human dimension because our body is also nature.”

In her 40s and living alone in São Paulo, she was ready to get out of the city. Beyond simply being closer to nature, Lia wanted a home that was connected to it: as peaceful and sustainable as possible—and also beautiful. She learned about rammed earth houses in a Netflix documentary and knew immediately that that was what she wanted.

Starting with property in a small village outside of Brazil, Lia worked with Arquipélago Arquitetos to develop prototypes for an ecovillage comprising three homes—one for herself and two to sell to like-minded individuals. The experimental residences—a studio, one-bed, and two-bed unit—were built, in a sense, with a modular method developed by the firm. Wooden frames to create foundations and rammed earth walls were used repeatedly and sequentially to grow the number of rooms with each consecutive plan.

Lia says that while the homes aren’t completely organic, as she would have liked, the rammed earth construction was the best way she had found to support her preference for connecting with and supporting the natural world. “The house represents my view of life in some way—how to be living as a human being on this planet,” she says.

Here, Arquipélago Arquitetos cofounder Luís Tavares shares how his firm built Lia’s homes.

538, 1,076, and 1,245 square feet—are built into the hillside, with a row of clerestories at the rear. The roofs are aluminum." layout="wide" credit="Photo by Pedro Kok" photoUserId="6180093317727002624"/>

A Natural Start

Luís Tavares: Piracaia is a small village in the countryside of São Paulo, about two hours from the city. It was started in the ’90s by people that wanted to build a sustainable place. There are construction rules, like how much concrete you can use. It’s a little bit controlled. At the start, they were more strict. Now they are more easygoing, but you have to present a project for approval before building. There are maybe 40 houses there.

Lia is very connected with the perspective of sustainable worlds and the natural use of materials. She wanted to create a modular design on her land in Piracaia that could be constructed in other places too. She found us because we had built with earth before. We had done some construction that was reproducible, but that also had an element of craftsmanship.

Building With Dirt

We prototyped three houses: small, medium, and large, with one, two, and three bedrooms. They’re made of earth from the site, which was turned into a construction material by adding sand and gravel. There are no industrial materials.

Earthen homes are naturally thermally efficient. They have impressive hygroscopic capacity, which is to say they balance humidity well. When it’s too dry, the walls put moisture back into a space; when it’s humid, as it often is in Brazil, the walls pull moisture in. Humidity is one of the things, I believe, that is most associated with comfort.

Rammed earth was once a common building method in the countryside of Brazil, but we wanted to approach it in a contemporary way. So we developed it into something that is more livable by adding wooden floors and ceilings, and glass sliders, for example.

A Construction Framework

These homes were the first time we thought about reproducing a design with rammed earth, and the efficiency of a construction site. The sequence of the construction was really important because the plan and sections were being repeated.

After foundations were set, we put up framing to create the rammed earth walls. The walls are set parallel and topped with a wood ceiling. The floors are wood, too, laid directly onto the foundation, without anything attaching them to it; it’s just gravity.

Next to each wall there is a steel bar that connects the ceiling with the foundation. We used that as a very direct construction method—it’s just putting one thing over another, but in kind of a poetic way also. We left a gap in the ceiling and then the bar goes through the gap. There’s a translucent sheet over the gap that lets sunlight into the house.

Considering the Interior

Since we were working in the countryside, we wanted to create a specific mood for the interiors. Specifically, we wanted to introduce natural materials like wood and stone. We cut into the site’s hillside to place the homes, and to hold up the earth, we built a stone wall for each. They end up being very present in the homes, because they’re part of the main entrance and form a hallway.

We mixed the stone with wood, and earth, of course, with materials that are minerals in another way. Windows and the panels that close the doors are made with aluminum. It’s an aluminum with a kind of velvety finish; it isn’t shiny. It has a softness that reflects greenery outside. It also reflects the colors of the walls.

Preserving Privacy

The homes are placed to work with the topography of the site, and in a way that preserves some existing trees. All the apertures are on the front side, and the homes rotated from one another, so each house has its own view of the land. The property isn’t very big, though, so when you go out and walk on the terrain, you are actually very close to your neighbor.

A Worthy Experiment

In the end, we changed the traditional craft aspect of rammed earth, wanting to create a more efficient method. But it ended up taking longer than expected, about two to three years.

As far as we know, this is the first prototype of a rammed earth home using a technique like this. Some aspects felt more efficient. We used the framework for the rammed earth to construct the kitchen island and dining table, for example. Everything was planned to be seen as a sequence.

More Construction Diary stories:

How Two Artists Turned a Cabin Outside Joshua Tree Into a Clear-Minded Retreat

She Envisioned a Dome Home—Then Made It a Reality Outside Joshua Tree

Project Credits:

Architect: Arquipélago Arquitetos / @arquipelago.co

Builder: Artesania

Structural and Civil Engineer: Stamade Estruturas

Cabinetry Design: AJ Marcenaria

Installations: Jarreta Projetos

Window Frames: Irmãos Farias