I've been building and restoring with earth for about twelve years now. I trained as an architect the conventional way (steel, concrete, glass) and it took my first restoration project, an old rammed-earth farmhouse nobody wanted to touch, to realize how much more interesting the older material actually was.

Earth doesn't behave like modern materials. It moves with the seasons, it needs to breathe, and if you get the wall thickness wrong the whole building suffers for it years later. That complexity is what keeps me doing this. Every site tells you what it needs if you're willing to slow down and read it before drawing anything.

I moved to Colombia's Coffee Region early in my career, drawn by how much of that knowledge was still alive here, in the walls of old houses, in builders who learned the technique from their fathers, not from a manual. Most of what I know about earth construction, I learned from them.