Build-up is a visitor education and field research center located within Ohio University’s Ridges Land Lab, a landscape shaped by successive cycles of cultivation, ecological change, and restoration. Rather than treating this evolving environment as a passive backdrop, the project allows natural processes to participate directly in the construction of architecture.

The project reinterprets the traditional wattle-and-daub wall by separating its framework from its infill. A porous wire-mesh structure wraps the building as an enlarged wattle, while leaves, dust, seeds, and other organic debris carried by wind and seasonal change gradually collect within it to form the daub. Unlike a conventional wattle-and-daub wall that begins complete and deteriorates over time, this envelope begins incomplete and is progressively constructed through accumulation.

Serving both visitors and field researchers, the building becomes an interface between human occupation and the surrounding ecosystem. Its changing envelope records environmental processes while making them visible and accessible for observation and education. Architecture is therefore understood not as a finished object imposed upon the site, but as an evolving framework continually shaped by time, weather, and material exchange.