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Terra Cotta Workshop: Highlighting Heritage within the Workplace
Old enough professions and institutions often struggle with the idea of legacy. It goes beyond whether one can keep expanding and creating. Furthermore, it goes into the idea of how you can build a future even with a storied past, especially if that past gets too heavy to carry. However, the Terra Cotta Workshop finds balance between history and the present.
Terra Cotta Workshop, located in Quang Nam, Vietnam, is a decades-old factory of earthenware and sculptures. Tropical Space, with engineer Bach Ngoc Hoang, led the redesign of the workshop.
Quang Nam exists within the South Central Region of the country. The province is a coastal area with a strong export and manufacturing history. One of its cities, Hội An, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999 due to its distinctive centuries-old buildings with local and foreign influence.
Building Around Heritage
The Terra Cotta Workshop’s well-preserved original brick kiln serves as the core structure of the whole cultural hub. Two brick walls spanning the compound divide the area into three main sections. One section gives tourists access to a space for creativity, another provides a work space for craftspeople, and the third centers on the kiln itself.
Greenery surrounds the entire space, including a small patch of farmland next to the Terra Cotta Studio. All the buildings and the brick walls spanning the property use clay bricks, presumably made from the workshops. The design allows for low windows for minimal sunlight and a perforated facade to ventilate the rooms.
One of the workshop’s sections has an “experiential” area, where visitors can come in for activities like making their own souvenirs from clay. The area also gives the visitors an opportunity to talk to the craftspeople about their profession.
On the other side is the daily working area, filled with wooden tables and shelves full of finished products. The right side contains a sink for the staff to wash their hands, while the left side has the gas kiln. The building uses a steel frame roof for cover and a rammed earthRammed EarthRammed earth construction compacts layers of moistened soil within formwork to create solid, load-bearing walls without fired brick or modern cement binding. Though historically limited in Philippine practice, rammed earthGo to Rammed Earth Glossary floor for natural humidity. It faces a body of water and trees, allowing its employees to find immersion within the environment.
The Brick Kiln and Restorative Creative Environments
Between the “experiential” area and workshop is the old brick kiln. It is surrounded by the two giant brick walls, accessible by a corridor. An outer brick layer surrounds the kiln, and visitors can climb up to the roof to get a bird’s eye view of the property.
A courtyard exists right outside of the brick kiln area. They filled the floor with broken brick slag, failed products, and leftovers. Apparently, its purpose is to surround visitors and craftspeople with terra cotta, to be reused appropriately in the future. It makes one think of the history that exists within the place.
Terra Cotta Workshop shows the endurance of creativity and industry even in the face of modernity. It preserves the old ways, whether as monuments of the past or as methods of the present. More than that, it gives us a perspective that human creativity and methodology will endure no matter what.
Related reading: Tropical Space’s Terra Cotta Studio wins Wienerberger Brick Award
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