Tatiana Bilbao creates rammed-earth installation at Art Omi

Mexico-based architecture practice Tatiana Bilbao Estudio has created a large-scale outdoor installation made of rammed earth derived from local soil that’s meant to break down over time for New York arts centre Art Omi.

Tatiana Bilbao Estudio‘s Borrowed Earth installation consists of four 7.5-foot-tall rammed-earth cruciform crosses, with a shorter cross form in the centre that serves as a bench. Each form was made with compacted soil harvested from the Hudson Valley area.

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Tatiana Bilbao Estudio based the design around a “repeatable basic unit” that eventually became the bench and surrounding columns.

The Borrowed Earth piece was commissioned by arts centre Art Omi, which oversees a 120-acre sculpture park at its campus in Ghent, New York.

Art Omi curator Julia van den Hout said rammed earth can be a “challenging material”, and it shaped much of the project’s design.

“They were not always crosses in our initial conversations,” van den Hout told Dezeen.

“As we started getting into the reality of trying to figure out how to construct this – because rammed earth is a challenging material to work with – and thinking structurally about how this would be built up, during those conversations, [it] shifted to being a cruciform column.”

“It also really resonated [because] it has such a strong classic modernist shape.”

The Art Omi and Tatiana Bilbao Estudio teams constructed the columns on site with guidance from a rammed-earth consultant based out of Mexico.

The team used soil from a construction site just down the road from Art Omi, according to van den Hout. They mixed it with sand and lime and then packed the mixture layer by layer into wooden formwork to create the sculptures.

Van den Hout says the installation is designed to decay over a period of about two years, although the team does not have “a strict answer” about how long it will last given external elements like weather.

“It’ll be an experiment,” she said. “We don’t quite know how fast it’s going to go. It is definitely soft. It crumbles. It’s lovely and tactile in that when you touch it, you really feel that sense that erosion can happen pretty easily. But simultaneously, they feel very stable.”

Recently, MOS Architects created a sculpture at Art Omi made of aluminium, while Young Projects installed a frayed, wooden pavilion at the park in 2024.

Tatiana Bilbao Estudio completed a sprawling aquarium in 2023 in Mexico, where the studio is primarily based and also spoke to Dezeen in 2019 about the country’s rising generation of prominent female architects.