Observations: terracotta and the thermal cycle of a day

In summer, terracotta is more a behaviour than a material. By mid-afternoon, it has been absorbing heat for hours, and it starts releasing it slowly into the evening, into the space around it, into the hand that rests against it. This is what many natural materials do: they participate in the thermal cycle of the day and the year: storing and releasing, warming and cooling, in conversation with the conditions outside.
Spaces built from these materials have a unique sensibility and connection with their context, a form of seasonal awareness driven by temperature.

The Observations grow from a daily habit of noticing details in nature and drawing design insights from them. They’re collected in a monthly digest as part of anooi’s newsletter, which gathers the studio’s world and explores the idea of nourishing spaces. The same attunement shapes the studio’s work, lives in A Biophilic Year – a book-object and online archive on people, nature, and design – and becomes a sensory practice with In Season, a seasonal physical letter.