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 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. The session raises the question of how inherited building logics can be adapted, combined, or reduced while maintaining their connection to place, and how construction itself—through proportion, assembly, and material use—can carry meaning and, at times, become ornamental without relying on image-making.