Architectural Design Workshop — Castaways Brick Fogon Fabrication

The Castaways Brick Fogon Fabrication Workshop is a direct extension of the spring 2024 Spoon Climate Studio & Workshop exploring the material properties and circularity of ‘waste’ brick. The Fall 2024 Fogon Workshop will be specifically focused on a selected, single brick stove design from the studio that was developed over the summer, and how it is fabricated in San Gregorio, a traditional farming community of chinampera farmers in Mexico City. The Workshop will continue to work with Cocina Collaboratorio, a local non-profit and will hold online reviews and discussions with local members of the San Gregorio community who will use the fogon.

The fogon, a traditional open hearth and wood cooking stove has its origins in Mesoamerican Nahuatl culture and family life. The development of the selected fogon design and its fabrication raise intriguing challenges: the fogon must mediate heat for cooking, hold cooking utensils, safely channel smoke in a chimney, be structurally stable and be scaled in size to provide a public gathering place for inter-generational cooks to prepare and share traditional food for community events.

The Workshop offers a hands-on opportunity to learn how an unconventional material—broken and irregular waste brick—can have new life in a functional prototype that can be replicated and adjusted as needs be on additional sites in San Gregorio. Students will produce detailed fabrication documents, brick jigs and layout tools and innovative instructions for building the fogon. The Nahuatl language has no word for ‘waste,’ which inspires a larger scale circularity project that represents how this ‘waste’ brick fogon could include local brick makers, undervalued forms of wood for fuel, and excess food harvested from local restaurants and chinampas. The Workshop will travel to Mexico City during a portion of the IAP period in January 2025 to build the fogon.