Earth Made: A Rammed Earth Courtyard Housing Scheme Built Around a Stepped Water Kund

Long before concrete, cities rose out of the ground beneath them. The project's own brief reminds us that archaeological evidence dates entire earthen cities back more than 10,000 years, citing Bam, Persia, Babylon, Yemen and the Great Wall of China. That lineage is the provocation here: if soil has outlasted empires, why does contemporary housing treat it as a curiosity rather than a foundation?

Earth Made, designed by dhananjay singh gautam and aditya bhadoria, answers with a compact courtyard scheme sited in Gwalior, India. The project received the People's Choice Award at Earth Made 2020, a recognition voted by the wider community rather than handed down from above, which suits a design so preoccupied with collective space.

Three Earthen Bars Pinwheel Around a Sunken Court

The aerial view places the scheme as a tight, rectangular plot inside a dense, tree-heavy neighbourhood, bounded by roads on two sides. Rather than filling the parcel edge to edge, the plan breaks the housing into three ochre bars that turn their backs to the street and wrap a central court. The bars are not quite parallel: the eastern block cants inward, following the angled road edge, which gives the courtyard a slightly skewed, trapezoidal geometry instead of a rigid square.

Pale paths thread between the blocks and clusters of trees occupy the northern edge and the corners, so the green reads as a buffer against traffic rather than leftover space. At the centre sits a terracotta-toned platform with a blue pool cut into it, the single gesture that every unit faces. It is a familiar courtyard logic, but here the void is lowered into the earth rather than simply left open.

A Stepped Kund Turns the Courtyard Into an Amphitheatre

The renders reveal what that central platform really is: a kund, a water tank reached by cascading flights of steps. Its walls fold into triangular, pyramidal tiers that drop from every side toward the pool, recalling the stepwells of the region. The steps double as seating, so the space can hold a quiet afternoon by the water or a neighbourhood gathering without any change of furniture.

The rendering in stark white sharpens the geometry, letting the sawtooth edges and receding planes cast crisp shadows across the pool. Viewed from the water level, the earthen housing bars float above the terraces like a horizon line, establishing a strong vertical sequence from dwelling to step to water. Sinking the commons below grade is a climatic move as much as a social one: the lowered basin offers a shaded, cooler pocket in a city known for punishing summers.

Walls That Read Like Geological Sediment

Up close, the housing walls show what the project is really about. Rammed earth is compacted layer by layer inside formwork, and the render celebrates that process instead of hiding it: horizontal bands of ochre, amber and rust run continuously across planes and around corners, each stripe a record of a single lift of soil. A simple timber door is the only interruption, set flush into the strata so the wall's mass dominates.

This is the scheme at its most persuasive. No cladding, no paint, no fake elevation: the structure is the finish. The thick walls promise thermal mass that smooths daily temperature swings, while the shifting colours give each surface a handmade irregularity that a uniform material could never supply. Readers interested in how this technique shaped other entries can explore the EARTH MADE journal on rammed earth.

Why This Project Matters

Earth Made pairs two inherited ideas, rammed earth walls and the stepped water tank, and shows they can reinforce each other. The earth gives the dwellings their thermal comfort and their character; the kund gives the residents a shared room that is cool, flexible and legible from every unit. Neither move is novel on its own, but together they form a coherent argument for low-energy, community-centred housing.

The proposal still leaves questions open, particularly about how its unit plans and sections perform in detail. Yet its clarity explains the community vote. In a building culture that often equates progress with imported materials, this project insists that the ground underfoot, compacted and exposed, can still be the most expressive and responsible material on site.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: dhananjay singh gautam, aditya bhadoria

Competition and award

People's Choice Award, Earth Made 2020

Location

Gwalior, India

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