With the growing environmental imperative, designers begin to consider material life-cycles, and return to locally-sourced and on-site found materials in their design. Within this context, and in light of the high contribution of material-transport to the environmental burden, architects re-explore earthen materials. The ability to perform in situ digital fabrication using advanced robotic fabrication tools allows practice to go beyond the alignment of traditional building techniques with contemporary standards. Using increased sensibility, robotic tools can be deployed to reform terrains and reconstitute their soil into architecture. As native soil on site is used to nurture the robotically produced architectural artefact, a new form of materiality emerges, titled here “contextual-digital materiality”, one rooted in the weaving of data, local material, topography and culture. The paper demonstrates three avenues towards it – large scale customization, material-aware construction, and a “material to material” integrated fabrication, which, together, seek to advance greater sensibility at territorial scales.
