Earthen Oasis: Mortarless Earth Blocks Stack a Shared Garden Into Accra Housing

Q: Who wrote "Earthen Oasis: Mortarless Earth Blocks Stack a Shared Garden Into Accra Housing"?

This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "Earthen Oasis: Mortarless Earth Blocks Stack a Shared Garden Into Accra Housing" about?

This article covers topics related to Housing, Transportation. Kente-patterned columns, interlocking earth walls and fish-filled pools turn an Accra housing block into a farm, a commons and a green refuge.

Most housing projects treat green space as leftover: a lawn between buildings, a planter at the door. Earthen Oasis inverts that order. Here the garden comes first, threaded through every level of a stacked brick block, and the apartments arrange themselves around it. The result reads less like a residential tower with landscaping and more like a vertical landscape that happens to house people.

Earthen Oasis is the work of Jared Sliman, Lauren Cantu and Tanner Theisen, of Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College. Sited in the airport residential district of Accra, Ghana, the project combines vertical living with earth block construction and was Shortlisted at Earth Made 2020. Its premise is direct: Accra's urban fabric lacks public green space and is being overtaken by concrete, so a housing block should give some of that green back, to residents and to the street alike.

A Hedge, Not a Wall, Meets the Street

The project's first move happens at the property line. Instead of the masonry compound walls that line the road in the street view, the team sets a clipped green hedge along the sidewalk, with vines spilling from the brick facade above. A pedestrian looks across planting rather than concrete. The boards describe the ground floor as a large, lush green space that is also open to the surrounding community, and this edge is where that openness starts: porous, soft and readable from the road.

Rendered sidewalk beside a clipped green hedge and brick wall, with a man looking out toward palms and a hazy road. Image: Jared Sliman, Lauren Cantu, Tanner Theisen

An Irregular Stack Built Around Views of Green

Seen from the corner, the building refuses a flat elevation. Brick volumes push forward and pull back, every terrace edge trails vines, and tall columns clad in blue and gold tile punctuate the mass. The team describes an atypical arrangement of solid and void on every elevation, with units positioned so that views of offsite greenery recur throughout the structure. The triangular columns and colourful tiles draw on kente cloth, the textile so closely tied to Ghanaian identity, which gives the concrete frame a local voice rather than a generic one.

The sections and axonometrics show how disciplined that irregularity actually is. A single structural and circulation frame carries three unit types, colour-coded in the diagrams: 24 family units, 45 doubles and 108 singles, each type totalling 27,000 square feet. Equal floor area across three household sizes is a quiet but meaningful decision; it lets the block house families and single residents in comparable measure, and the section reveals planted pools and kente-tiled voids slotted between the apartments rather than relegated to the roof.

Rendered stepped brick housing block with trailing vines on every terrace edge and patterned screens, under a pale cloudy sky. Image: Jared Sliman, Lauren Cantu, Tanner Theisen

Pair of colored section drawings of a stacked brick housing block, with axonometric diagrams below sorting structure, family, double and single units. Image: Jared Sliman, Lauren Cantu, Tanner Theisen

Earth Blocks That Lock Together Without Mortar

The material strategy is where the Earth Made brief sharpens the design. Walls are built from earth blocks mixed from raw earth, concrete, fly ash and water. Each block has two raised nodes on top that slide into a recess on the underside of the next, so the courses interlock and stack without mortar. Light steel framing holds two layers of these blocks in place, concrete is poured into the cavity between them to form a unified wall, and a steel plate bolted along the top ties the assembly together. Concrete shear walls and columns, ornamented with ceramic tile, carry the structure.

The logic is constructional as much as aesthetic. Blocks this simple can be produced almost anywhere and handled easily by the people laying them, and removing mortar removes a skilled step from the process. In the long section, those earthen walls read as warm orange boxes hung within the concrete frame, while a central open atrium cuts through the building and lets figures on each level see one another across the void.

Colored section drawing of a stacked brick housing block with a central open atrium, silhouetted figures on each level and a runner outside. Image: Jared Sliman, Lauren Cantu, Tanner Theisen

A Ground Floor That Farms Fish and Feeds the Block

Under the waffle slab of the covered court, the oasis becomes literal. Brick-edged planting beds sit beside pools, green light falls through openings in the slab, and children play between kente-tiled panels. The community spaces are built around aquaponics, where fish and plants are cultivated in one system and sustain each other. Residents help care for the plants and fish and receive a share of what they grow, while surplus produce is sold to the neighbourhood, with the profits feeding back into the system. The boards put the pools at 3,000 cubic feet with capacity for 7,000 fish, a scale that makes this more than a decorative water feature.

The courtyard extends that idea upward. Vines drape from balconies, lavender planters frame a lily pond, and water cascading from one pool to the next is meant to cool the air and mask the noise of the city. The team frames the luxury of the project in exactly these terms: walking out of your front door and down the hall into a space full of herbs and vegetables your community has grown. It is an argument that abundance, not finish or exclusivity, is what makes housing feel generous.

Rendering of a covered ground-level court with a waffle slab ceiling, patterned panels and a brick-edged planting bed, children playing nearby. Image: Jared Sliman, Lauren Cantu, Tanner Theisen

Rendered courtyard with a lily pond, lavender planters and hanging vines draping from balconies, backlit by strong sun flare. Image: Jared Sliman, Lauren Cantu, Tanner Theisen

Why This Project Matters

Earthen Oasis ties three ambitions together that are usually treated separately: low-tech earthen construction, cultural identity in the building envelope, and food production as shared public life. Each strengthens the others. The mortarless block makes the walls buildable; the kente-inspired columns make the frame recognisably of Accra; the aquaponic court gives residents a daily reason to meet and gives the neighbourhood a reason to come inside.

The larger lesson is about where green space lives in a dense city. Rather than asking residents to travel to a park that Accra's fabric increasingly lacks, the project distributes pockets of garden horizontally and vertically through the building, and opens its ground floor to the street. If housing is going to absorb urban growth, this proposal suggests it can also absorb some of the landscape that growth erases.