Tatiana Bilbao Builds Rammed-Earth Crosses Meant to Crumble

Four shoulder-high cruciform crosses made of compacted Hudson Valley soil now stand at Art Omi — and they're designed to fall apart. Tatiana Bilbao Estudio's installation, called Borrowed Earth, is meant to break down over roughly two years, turning decay into the point of the exercise rather than a maintenance problem.

The Mexico-based practice built the work for Art Omi, the arts centre that runs a 120-acre sculpture park at its campus in Ghent, New York. Four rammed-earth crosses form the perimeter, each about shoulder-high, while a shorter cross at the centre serves as a bench. Every form was made with compacted soil harvested from the Hudson Valley area.

How did crosses become the form?

The shape wasn't the starting point. Tatiana Bilbao Estudio based the design around what the studio calls a "repeatable basic unit" that eventually became the bench and the surrounding columns.

Art Omi curator Julia van den Hout told Dezeen the material drove the geometry. "They were not always crosses in our initial conversations," she said.

"As we started getting into the reality of trying to figure out how to construct this – because rammed earth is a challenging material to work with – and thinking structurally about how this would be built up, during those conversations, [it] shifted to being a cruciform column."

The cruciform carried a second appeal. "It also really resonated [because] it has such a strong classic modernist shape," van den Hout said.

What is it made of, exactly?

The construction method was deliberately local and low-tech. The Art Omi and Tatiana Bilbao Estudio teams built the columns on site, working with guidance from a rammed-earth consultant based in Mexico.

• Soil sourced from a construction site just down the road from Art Omi, according to van den Hout.
• A mix of that soil with sand and lime.
• The mixture packed layer by layer into wooden formwork to create the sculptures.

That's it. No steel, no cladding, no sealant fighting the weather.

How long will it last?

Van den Hout says the installation should decay over about two years, though the team doesn't have "a strict answer" given external elements like weather.

"It'll be an experiment," she said. "We don't quite know how fast it's going to go. It is definitely soft. It crumbles. It's lovely and tactile in that when you touch it, you really feel that sense that erosion can happen pretty easily. But simultaneously, they feel very stable."

Soft but stable. That tension is the show.

Borrowed Earth joins a run of architectural commissions at the park. MOS Architects recently created a sculpture at Art Omi made of aluminium, and Young Projects installed a frayed, wooden pavilion there in 2024. Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, meanwhile, completed a sprawling aquarium in Mexico in 2023, where the studio is primarily based.

As rammed earth keeps surfacing in contemporary architecture, Art Omi's version asks the blunter question: what does a building owe the ground it came from? Here, the answer is literal. The soil goes back.