Lara Davis

This lecture will present Lara Davis’ professional practice, focusing on intangible heritage and indigenous knowledge in the masonry in a range of mortared and un-mortared applications. While most traditions in the masonry pass down knowledge from one generation to the next, contemporary construction practice is often uprooted and no longer tied to a cultural system of knowledge transfer. Yet a mason is nothing without the vernacular heritage that has developed it or without the “old guard” masons. It takes a lifetime of accumulated knowledge to become a true expert or master craftsman, and vernacular knowledge is distilled from over hundreds or even thousands of years of place-based empirical testing. A careful study of local traditional methods may aide tremendously in innovation in materials and techniques as well as in the conservation of built heritage.

A healthy dialogue between masons and preservation specialists – often involving collaborations between craftsmen, preservation architects, archaeologists, historians, chemists, geologists, quarrymen, ceramic engineers, or materials manufacturers – can assist in condition assessments, material specifications, and structural design:

• to identify the mechanisms of pathologies in the masonry, material incompatibilities or even to assess structural failure in historic buildings.
• to identify or develop materials, establish testing protocols and quality control standards, or to elaborate shop drawings.
• to determine unconventional material properties such as adhesion or to establish sequenced-based equilibrium strategies.

Preservation specialists likewise may work with masons to better understand the place-based, climatic suitability of local methods and materials, or to tune the specifications of a project to consider difficult and changeable factors. This includes climatic performance (such as thermal expansion and insulation, freeze-thaw behavior, capillarity and other wetting/drying patterns) or the impact of weather on construction parameters (such as water content, mortar workability, adhesion, shrinkage, and curing). Working together may improve training for new generations of preservation specialists and masons.

The lecture will present case studies of various projects, a sampling from a wide range of traditional materials and methods, from earthen construction to fired brick and stone masonry. It will address the use of non-traditional mortars such as raw and stabilized earth, rapid-setting gypsum, natural cement, lime, and bio-polymers (including animal byproducts, sugar-in-the-raw, and fermented straw, cactus and tree nut).

Lara Davis is an architect and mason with 25 years of experience in masonry design and construction – a specialist in earthen building and vaulted masonry. She is the founding partner of Limaçon Design and a member of CRAterre (the International Center for Earthen Architecture in Grenoble, France), ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Earthen Architectural Heritage, and the board of directors at Opus 40. She previously served for ten years as co-director of the Auroville Earth Institute, India and representative for the UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture. She holds a BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics, School of Art & Design at Alfred University and an M.Arch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lara has been recognized for her research at the Auroville Earth Institute, Block Research Group (ETH Zürich), Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (Universität Stuttgart), MIT Masonry Research Group and the Future Cities Laboratory (Singapore). She has taught structural theory of masonry at the ETH Zürich, led hands-on training programs on several continents, and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at RISD. Notable professional projects include the Martin Puryear sculpture ‘Lookout’ at Storm King Art Center, the Sharanam Center for Rural Development in Pondicherry, India, and the Kaza Eco-Community Center in Spiti Valley, India. Her work has been exhibited at the Modern Museum of Art, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Venice Biennale and MIT Museum.

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