“The processes that produce today’s built environment are mostly invisible. Materials simply appear as products and give themselves up to the market. Any stories that accompany them are bestowed post factum as one more layer of abstraction. Natural building materials are the antithesis of this: Immanent, intuitive, historical, and ecological, their presence within the built environment is experienced as a shocking break with the status quo. A crack in the end of history through which tendrils of a future world, beyond the imagination of capitalism, reclaims the present.”

“In a galaxy far far away from global techno-capital, industry sustainability standards, and intergovernmental agreements on climate change, live communities of amateur and professional natural building scientists with an alternative vision for the future. A distributed community of people connected by their enthusiasm for a kind of building and belonging that attempts to reestablish social relationships and material reproduction around a rejection of gross fungibility, global consumerism, and the commodity form.”

-Excerpts from Groupwork’s paper “The End of The End of History” for NZBERS 2025 (Built Environment Research Symposium) at Massey University, Albany Campus.

Over the past four years Groupwork has developed an earth-building practice that includes prototyping high-performance composite clay wall panels, prefabricated light earth insulation units, experimental rammed earth formwork, and educational community workshops for architectural designers and aspiring self-builders. Groupwork are active members of the Earthbuilding Association of New Zealand (EBANZ), and have built a connection to natural building in New Zealand that allows us to investigate these ancient, and in today’s climate, innovative strategies for building that can have positive impacts on ecology and embodied carbon of buildings, offer healthier living environments that are free from Volatile Organic Compounds found in most conventional building materials, and that provide a more engaged relationship to the supply chain, giving you more control over the raw materials that will make up your building.

Earthen Material Research and Projects

2022 Groupwork and pre:fab Christmas Mixer

For pre:fab and Groupwork’s end of year party we invited all of our colleagues, clients, friends, and relatives to stomp in the mud for an afternoon in Cox’s Bay. This all ages event asked attendees to work together to make light adobe bricks using a mixture containing clay and hemp hurd, custom stamped to-go bags were available to take your brick home to dry.

2022-2025 Clay Board R&D

Groupwork has collaborated with master earth builder Alan Drayton of Biobuild, most well known in architecture circles for his delivery of rammed earth, on the development of a clay based, bio-aggregate wall panel with the vision of a mass-producable carbon sequestering alternative to typical construction materials.

2024 Ciudad Abierta Tapial

In 2024 Groupwork operated between Aotearoa and Chile, participating in the design and prototyping of experimental rammed earth formwork for the construction of a theatre at the La Ciudad Abierta “The Open City”. While attending the school of architecture and design at PUCV in Valparaiso we worked with academics, leading a group of students to develop prototypes for curved and complex rammed earth structures.

2024 Massey University Teaching, Workshops, and Material Testing

Back in NZ, we were working with students at Massey University to carry out a series of laboratory controlled tests, comparing our clay composite wall board with other materials with regard to performance for product certification (such as BRANZ standards). The clay based material performed better than equivalent products in the market in all the categories we tested.

2024 Light Adobe Workshops in Chile

At the end of 2024 and early 2025 we ran two versions of light earth brick making workshops we had previously carried out in NZ with students, and community members from PUCV and La Ciudad Abierta in Chile. For one workshop we sourced all the materials for the bricks in La Ciudad Abierta, including harvesting, drying, and pulverising reeds by hand to make building fibres, and shredding architecture drawings from the previous semester’s student work for cellulose binder.

2025 Earthskin Residency

This year Groupwork was invited by the Earthskin Trust to undertake a week-long artist residency in Warkworth. We used the time to experiment with the sculptural qualities of our light earth mix including testing the limits of lightweight moulded forms. We also invited our network of aspiring earth-building peers to come to Earthskin and make large format clay panels and learn about the various construction techniques used in architect Graeme North’s own home, now owned by Earthskin.