Earth Made Residence: Stacking a Ghanaian Compound House into 36 Units Made Entirely of Earth

Earth is the oldest building material we have. It still struggles with a reputation problem: too often it reads as humble, rural, a fallback rather than a choice. The fastest way to change that perception is not another treatise on thermal mass. It is a building so striking that nobody thinks to call it primitive.

That is the wager behind the Earth Made Residence, designed by Katarzyna Skibińska, Architect and Creative Director, and Justyna Kościółek, Project Lead, of the studio Cublo. Set in Accra, Ghana, the scheme organizes 36 housing units as a modern interpretation of the traditional Ghanaian residential compound house. It received Editor's Choice at Earth Made 2020.

A Facade of Boxes That Refuse to Line Up

The front elevation reads as a field of individual volumes pulled in and out of a common plane. Some boxes project with angled reveals that frame deep-set windows; others sit flush, punctuated by perforated screens that filter light and view. Toward one end the composition steps upward, breaking the roofline into a staggered crown. The result is a facade that expresses each dwelling rather than hiding it behind a uniform grid, which suits a building rooted in the compound house, a type built around distinct households sharing common ground.

Cublo states the ambition plainly: an iconic building with a modern, dynamic shape, completely made out of the earth, so that it becomes visible evidence that earthen architecture can be attractive. The banded, warm-toned surfaces of the boxes carry that argument across the whole elevation.

A Sloping Canopy That Lifts the Homes off the Street

Below the residential volumes, a long, tilted canopy cuts the building in two. Beneath it, a fully glazed ground floor opens to a paved forecourt, inviting pedestrians close. Above it, the housing begins. Seen at the corner, the canopy slopes down to meet the ground like a landform, and the cantilevered boxes overhead appear to hover. This horizontal plane does real work: it separates the public life of the street from the private life of the dwellings without resorting to a wall.

Grass Embankments That Turn the Base into Landscape

Approached from the rear, the building takes on a different character. A gravel path runs between steep grass embankments, and the lower body of the building merges into these planted slopes. The stacked volumes rise above a green base rather than a hard podium. In the renderings, the embankments become places to fly kites and walk, a reminder that earth here is not only a wall material but also the ground that people occupy. The compound house, with its shared open space at the center, finds an echo in this communal terrain.

A Rooftop Terrace Wrapped in Perforated Brick

At the top, the stepped massing frees up a timber-decked terrace furnished with lounge seating and lanterns. Perforated brick screens line its edges, filtering wind and sightlines while keeping the space open to the sky. The same screen motif that animates the street facade returns here at the scale of the body, offering residents a shared outdoor room above the city. It is a gentle counterpoint to the individuality of the boxes below: a commons at the summit.

Why This Project Matters

Earthen architecture is usually defended on environmental and cultural grounds. The Earth Made Residence chooses a sharper argument: desirability. By stacking 36 units into a dynamic, cantilevered composition, Cublo tests whether earth can carry the formal ambition normally reserved for concrete and glass, and whether that ambition can make the material aspirational again.

Equally important is what the project keeps. The compound house survives not as decoration but as an organizing idea: individual dwellings expressed one by one, gathered around shared ground at the base and a shared terrace at the top. For Accra and for cities like it, that pairing of a local typology with a confident, contemporary image offers a persuasive model for how housing density and earthen construction might grow together.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Katarzyna Skibińska, Justyna KościółekStudio: Cublo

Competition and award

Editor's Choice, Earth Made 2020

Location

Accra, Ghana

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