The name Martin Rauch is inevitably associated with earth building. The pioneer has been planning and realizing projects using the earth building technique since 1984.

The name Martin Rauch is inevitably associated with earth building. Since 1984, the pioneer has been planning and realizing projects using the earth building technique – and creating aesthetic buildings in close collaboration with architects. In this way, the forgotten building material has been brought to the attention of a modern architectural public.

Martin Rauch describes what makes clay as a building material so ecological for him as a small and manageable cycle of extraction, use and recycling: “Clay is an eroded material that is available everywhere. You can take it, mix it with water and shape it. In the end, you can return it to nature.” It is therefore understandable that Rauch dedicates his working life to this building material.

Although we live in a time in which the public demands that building is sustainable, the recognition of earth as a “modern” ecological building material came late – probably with the Rauch House, which Martin Rauch built for himself and his family together with Roger Boltshauser between 2005 and 2008. The building gave earth building an architectural face. It was recognized: Building with earth is aesthetic.

The fact that building with earth is also ecological may not even sound worth mentioning at first. However, when Martin Rauch and his team from “Lehm Ton Erde” designed the Rauch house, the sustainability aspect was not yet so obvious. It was for Rauch, but not for the housing subsidies in Vorarlberg. When the energy certificate for the Rauch house was drawn up, the materials used, such as clay plaster and reed panels, did not come off particularly well. In 2009, however, the house was recalculated – and scored better than a comparable house made of local wood. So it’s a question of definition – and that’s precisely why the opinion of the architectural public on clay as a building material is very important for Martin Rauch’s work. In principle, it is the only way to drive it forward – both technically and in terms of the next generation. After all, Rauch and his team at Lehm Ton Erde are unique in the earth building industry. This should change for the future.

You can find out more in Baumeister 8/2014 from August 1.

Photo: Frank Stolle

The poetry collection “Schiefern” by Esther Kinsky explores the analogy between human memory and metamorphic rock – a sensual search for the lifeless. On the map, they are small patches off the west coast of Scotland, so small that it is easy to overlook them. You have to seek them out specifically to find them. You don’t just come across […]

The poetry collection “Schiefern” by Esther Kinsky explores the analogy between human memory and metamorphic rock – a sensual search for the lifeless.

On the map, they are small spots off the west coast of Scotland, so small that it is easy to overlook them. You have to seek them out to find them. You don’t just stumble across them. The Inner Hebrides of Scotland, a group of islands at the top of the British Isles, are a popular travel destination. Those who come here long for the original, the wild, the rugged. For the salty wind that catches hair and clothes and makes them stiff. For the Atlantic, its waves crashing against the black rock. Gneiss. Granite. Basalt. Slate.

Esther Kinsky, translator and poet and 2018 for “Hain. Geländeroman” in the fiction category at the Leipzig Book Fair, has dedicated a volume of poetry to slate and the region where the sedimentary rock was mined for centuries with the simple yet telling title “Schiefern”.

The quarries on Slate Islands are still there, as are the remnants of a now defunct industry. Kinsky embarks on a voyage of discovery and wraps her observations of nature in words that are enigmatic to decipher and carry us away to the remoteness of the Inner Hebrides, to the black, raging sea, above which the reader floats like an invisible person in the mental space that Kinsky spins with her words.

It is precisely there, in this space of thought, that the analogies between something thoroughly lifeless and human can be found. There are only a few people in this three-part volume, but it is not lacking in humanity. In fact, it is quite astonishing how sensually it is possible to write about waves carrying spray and “plates with a / surface like petrified quiet waves” without slipping into kitschy romanticism.

“Nature Writing”

Nature has been tempting writers to write about it as the main protagonist since the 18th century. In Anglo-Saxon, “nature writing” is the name given to lavish literary descriptions of trees, meadows, flowers and cloudbursts. In German, the term “Naturpoesie” or “nature poetry” has become commonplace. Esther Kinsky has stood out in literature for years with such nature poetry.

In 2013, she weaved four cycles of poems about decay and growth in “Naturschutzgebiet” (Nature Reserve), based on a neglected city park. If Kinsky’s work is now categorized as “nature writing”, she is happy to contradict this. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio, she once said that she did not see herself in the tradition of nature writing. This term is too diffuse, too sprawling in terms of what it encompasses and what it does not. “Nature writing” can be anything, she says. So why not her latest work “Schiefern”, one might ask?

The layers of time

Early on in “Schiefern”, the word “memory” is used “as a space of absences, moved by the transparent hand of unpredictable synapses and imponderable shifts of deposits in the slowly emerging and deepening furrows and folds of the brain”. Kinsky is concerned with the layers of time that accumulate over memories. At first very gently, then more clearly, she draws linguistic parallels between human memory and the preserved history on the surface of the rocks, which the tides and times have passed by over millions of years.

The past is preserved in the stone, it only has to be read from its wrinkles, as if the stone were an old, cherished old man whose weathered face bears the traces of life. Kinsky writes of “signs without hand or foot / in the stone to which no one / knows how to make a rhyme / but the greatest possible past”.

“Schiefern” could be the modern sequel to Adalbert Stifter’s 1853 short story “Bunte Steine” and join the ranks of “Granit”, “Kalkstein” and “Turmalin”. But as treacherously idyllic as Stifter’s detailed, Biedermeier-like depictions of nature are, Kinsky’s description of the Slate Islands is just as uncharitable. The coolness of the surroundings snows through her words. There is a harshness in them that you don’t want to imagine without.

Information about the book

Esther Kinsky: Slates.
D: 24,00 Euro
A: 24,70 Euro
CH: 34.50 Swiss francs
Published: 23.03.2020
Hardcover, 103 pages
ISBN: 978-3-518-42921-1