PJ Dick Innovation Fund Teaching Grant: Soft Form — Burnt Clay

Soft Form — Burnt Clay
Instructor: Laura Garófalo, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon Architecture

This hands-on course explores the synergy between ceramic 3D printing and the creation of soft, organic, fluid ceramic forms. Historically, terracotta was praised for its capacity to be molded into any geometry; this course reinvents that potential in a contemporary context centered on expressive form, unique structures, and material-driven experimentation. Students engage directly with clay through both digital and tactile means, utilizing computational design tools — including AI image to model speculations — alongside sustained work with 3D clay printers.

The curriculum emphasizes challenging standardized production norms to design complex geometries. We investigate how soft forms inspired by natural scale structures or patterned aggregations can be realized through manufacturing methods that blend digital precision, such as CNC-milled molds or robotic control, with the hands-on material intuition essential to ceramic craft.

A central component of the course is an exploration of ceramic material logics — the inherent behaviors, constraints, and opportunities embedded in clay as a responsive medium. Students study how clay’s plasticity, shrinkage, structural capacity, drying characteristics, and fluid-to-solid transitions can become generative design drivers rather than limitations. These logics guide decisions about geometry, ornamentation, layering strategies, and printing behavior, encouraging students to design with material tendencies instead of imposing purely digital form. By understanding how clay coils slump, fuse, warp, or self-support under different deposition patterns, students develop a design approach rooted in a dynamic feedback loop between computation, fabrication, and material behavior.

A primary focus is linking these aesthetic soft forms and material logics to performative objectives, transforming ornament into bioclimatic systems responsive to climate change. Students develop prototypes that leverage clay’s intrinsic thermal and hydraulic properties for heat exchange, shading, water channeling, or evaporative cooling.

The course embraces discovery and the productive unpredictability of clay, resulting in innovative architectural assemblies that move terracotta beyond conventional cladding toward a materially resilient future.

Image: Scaled assembly by Sarah Kwok and J. Li produced for the 2024 ASO Studio “TerraForming,” and the terracotta rainscreen assembly produced by CMU students in a seminar in 2020.