Vernacular Frictions: Between Ancestral Knowledge and Contemporary Experiment

Working from different contexts yet converging on shared concerns, this session examines how vernacular knowledge can remain operative today without becoming stylistic quotation, by treating inherited building cultures—materials, techniques, and climate-based intelligence—not as forms to mimic but as frameworks to edit, test, and recalibrate.

In the work of Ted’A Arquitectes and Leopold Banchini, constraint becomes an active driver: resource economies, environmental adaptation, and craft traditions are translated into precise decisions about proportion, assembly, and detail, so that construction reads less as problem-solving and more as architectural syntax. From there, the discussion asks how far established building logics can be pushed before transformation occurs, and what kinds of continuity are still possible when systems are stretched, hybridized, or stripped back. The closing question is about expression: how restraint, layering, and technique can carry meaning—and, at times, slip into ornament