Trade School — Stone & Earth Crafting
Mineral de Pozos
Location
Guanajuato, Mexico
Year
2022
Mineral de Pozos — a former silver-mining town in the high desert of Guanajuato — is where MAT Studio's material identity was forged. This graduation project, developed during the Post-Master in 3D Printing Architecture at IAAC Barcelona, proposed a trade school dedicated to the ancestral crafts of stone cutting and earth construction, augmented by computational fabrication tools.
The building itself is a manifesto. Load-bearing walls of rammed earth — compacted in layers using local soil, each stratum visible like geological strata — form the primary structure. A series of stone-vaulted workshops, informed by the region's abandoned mine architecture, house the training spaces. The roof structure, designed parametrically and fabricated using robotic 3D printing with earth-based composites, bridges the ancient and the digital in a single gesture.
More than a building, the project is an argument: that the future of architecture lies not in choosing between tradition and technology, but in their synthesis. Students learn to carve stone by hand in the morning and operate robotic fabrication systems in the afternoon. This duality — craft and computation, earth and algorithm — is the founding principle of MAT Studio.
