Spring Equinox Newsletter

In July 2025, pre:fab platform – a collective of architecture practitioners, and others building towards a future we can all belong to – participated in a residency at the Earthskin studio’s home and gardens in the Graeme North house in Kaipara Flats. 

They used this time to think and theorise the future of their group, cook and eat a number of incroyable meals with Nancy and a group of French woofers, and experiment with the potential of a lightweight adobe mix  – colloquially referred to as “mudGIB” when in panel form - that they have been exploring with BioBuild’s Alan Drayton and Groupwork Architecture Aotearoa.

In the spirit of the house and Graeme North, pre:fab also hosted a mudGIB-making workshop, inviting architects to get their feet dirty and learn about clay-based material practices - and coincidentally hosting Daniel Mohr, who lived and worked with Graeme constructing the house and its surrounding buildings over the course of 8 years. Daniel was able to provide invaluable anecdotes and insights into understanding how the house was constructed, consented, and lived in, and was an expert with a trowel when it came to filling panel moulds.

pre:fab is committed to the exploration of local material cultures and how they create a sense of belonging, through including communities in their production, and imbuing our shared spaces with the trace and familiarity of people and places we know. 

pre:fab has been invited to design and fabricate an installation for the Urban Art Village project outside Britomart Station in Tāmaki Makaurau at the end of October. They want to bring dirt to the city, sharing with an anticipated 40,000 visitors what it might mean to build and make with local materials, and your hands, in the otherwise concrete jungle of Auckland CBD. 

Over the course of their 10 day residency, pre:fab constructed several scale models of possible forms and construction techniques for this installation. Ultimately they decided that they will invite members of the (curious) public to take off their shoes, stomp around in some mud, and sculpt shapes and forms under a canopy of earthen balls which are suspended above them like a cargo net.

It was a wonderful opportunity for this group of young architects to imagine, dream about, and make earthen artefacts against the backdrop of a truly future-visionary home.

pre:fab would like to thank Earthskin and Nancy for all the support, teachings, and enthusiasm; Alan Drayton for his mentorship; and the earth-building community at large for creating such a generative and welcoming environment for exploration, and for helping us pre:fabricate a future we can all belong to. 

We hope to see some of you at The Urban Art Village on the 30th and 31st of October.