Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth

Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth is a courtyard installation led by Liz Gálvez (Office e.g.) that stages mass and fiber as shared infrastructures for collective comfort in the Los Angeles summer. Building on the practice’s ongoing investigation into heat resilience and material experimentation by staging thermal infrastructures as architectural and civic propositions, the project adapts passive cooling strategies from desert contexts into the M&A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard.

Earthen thermal mass columns anchor the site, paired with a lightweight, woven canopy that modulates shade, air movement, and light. These systems are not novel inventions but re-imagined inheritances: stone or earthen blocks and woven shade have long functioned as elemental infrastructures across cultures and climates. Recast in the courtyard, they compose an experimental ecology that makes heat’s stubborn but predictable movement legible. 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.

Contemporary design culture continues to privilege mechanical conditioning as the default mode of environmental control, often at great ecological cost. Earthen Comforts reframes this paradigm by re-centering thermal design as an architectural and civic act, intervening in urgent debates around climate adaptation, material practice, and collective life.

Earthen Comforts is the final site-specific installation designed for the M&A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard, a partnership between Materials & Applications and Craft Contemporary. Each summer since 2021, M&A transforms Craft Contemporary’s courtyard into a venue grounded by a public work of experimental architecture. A series of summer events brings architects, artists, and storytellers together into dialogue, with renewed focus on urban environments and community engagement.

Earthen Comforts was collectively curated by the 2025 M&A Program Committee, comprising Austin Merchant, Aviva Rubin, Hilary Huckins-Weidner, Leana Scott, and Sara Suárez, with M&A Staff Kate Yeh Chiu, and Michael Lagos.

Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth is generously supported by the Pasadena Art Alliance, the  University of California, Berkeley,  Arts Research Center (ARC), and the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design. Earthen Comforts has additionally received support from Nous Engineering.

Office e.g. & (Im)material Matters Lab, UC Berkeley
Liz Gálvez
Ian Chu
Theint Lei
Lincoln Ruiz-Truong

Thermal Consultation
Salmaan Craig

Wood Assemblies Consultation
Paul Mayencourt (Berkeley Wood Lab)

Adobe Consultation
adobeisnotsoftware

Adobe Blocks
Rex Edhlund- Wild Mojave and Pioneertown Adobe

Fabrication Team
Cesar Franco & Team, Noah Shipley

Liz Gálvez is a registered architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley, where she directs the (Im)material Matters Lab. Her practice, Office e.g., investigates building technologies—historical and emerging—through environmental responsibility and material experimentation.