Martin Rauch – From clay to earth, from craft to architecture

Martin Rauch is a ceramic artist and earth building expert. Since the 1990s, he has dedicated himself to the conception, planning and realization of rammed earth building projects, often in collaboration with international architecture firms. In 1999, he founded the company Lehm Ton Erde Baukunst GmbH. In addition to many awards, he received the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2022 and has been an honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair Earthen architecture, building cultures and sustainable development since 2010.

Martin Rauch came to earth building not through architecture, but through craftsmanship. He gained his first experience as a ceramist, stove builder and sculptor. He was already familiar with the proximity to the earth, to the shaped material, from his parents’ farmhouse in Vorarlberg. The connection he experienced there between work, the environment and the will to create shaped him early on – as did the desire to create living spaces through practical action.

His time in Africa was decisive for him. Like several of his siblings, he worked as a development aid worker and encountered traditional building methods there, which functioned with the simplest of means using local materials – and at the same time were brutally displaced by imported, resource-intensive technologies. This contrasting experience gave his artistic impulse a global perspective. What had previously attracted him instinctively – working with earth, shaping with clay – now found a conceptual framework. The modeling of kilns became the design of spaces. Ceramics became architecture.

At the Vienna University of Applied Arts, Rauch decided not to design a tea service, contrary to the wishes of his professor Matteo Thun. Instead, he dedicated his diploma thesis to a comprehensive study of new design possibilities in earth construction with the emblematic title Lehm Ton Erde.

Early on, he was particularly interested in the rammed earth technique – a construction method that does not rely on cladding or finishing, but allows the material itself to speak. As with unglazed ceramics, the form here arises directly from the manufacturing process: the layering of the earth becomes a structure, an ornament, a statement.

With the ceramist’s keen sense of the composition, chemical-physical conditions and effects of the material, Rauch began to explore the language of the earth – and develop it further. It was not only a matter of visualizing the creative potential, but also of technical precision. Step by step, Rauch optimized the natural material mixtures, refined compaction and formwork techniques and specifically supplemented traditional construction methods with reinforcement layers – without abandoning their structural principle. Tools, scaffolding systems and work processes were continuously developed, test walls were built and the knowledge gained was directly incorporated into the next stage of development.

In 1999, Rauch founded Lehm Ton Erde Baukunst GmbH to put rammed earth construction on a new professional footing. Since then, the company has been combining craftsmanship, architecture, research and building practice in interdisciplinary teams. Under his leadership, earth has not only been rediscovered as a sustainable building material, but has also been established internationally as a creatively sophisticated, load-bearing and future-oriented construction method in numerous projects.