Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth is a courtyard installation by Office e.g. for the M&A x Craft Contemporary partnership, exploring passive cooling, heat resilience, and collective comfort through fiber, mass, and earth-based materials in Los Angeles summer.
Contemporary design culture continues to privilege mechanical conditioning as the default mode of environmental control, often at great ecological cost. Earthen Comforts reframes this paradigm by re-centering thermal design as an architectural and civic act, intervening in urgent debates around climate adaptation, material practice, and collective life.
Earthen Comforts is the final site-specific installation designed for the M&A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard, a partnership between Materials & Applications and Craft Contemporary. Each summer since 2021, M&A transforms Craft Contemporary’s courtyard into a venue grounded by a public work of experimental architecture. A series of summer events brings architects, artists, and storytellers together into dialogue, with renewed focus on urban environments and community engagement.
Earthen Comforts was collectively curated by the 2025 M&A Program Committee, comprising Austin Merchant, Aviva Rubin, Hilary Huckins-Weidner, Leana Scott, and Sara Suárez, with M&A Staff Kate Yeh Chiu, and Michael Lagos.
Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth is generously supported by the Pasadena Art Alliance, the University of California, Berkeley, Arts Research Center (ARC), and the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design. Earthen Comforts has additionally received support from Nous Engineering.
