Stand in the double-height foyer of the Maison de quartier de la Louve at Lausanne’s Plaines-du-Loup and put a hand on the wall. It is 45 cm of pisé, rammed earth, and the earth came out of the hole the building now stands in. Around you, four volumes that the City of Lausanne calls «maisons dans la maison» sit under one roof in timber and hemp-lime. They hold a 140-seat hall, after-school care, a cafeteria, workshops and offices. Isabel Borner reviewed the house for espazium on 2 November 2026, under the title «Meister Yoda auf den Wolfsebenen». Her best line fits it: the building «erteilt seine Lehren in Hanf, Lehm und Holz», teaching its lessons in hemp, clay and timber.

The review is new, but the work is older. The city announced the result of the parallel study mandate (MEP) on 15 December 2021, laid the first stone on 6 September 2024 and inaugurated the house on 19 June 2026. As an office, we care less about the finished object than about the practice that carried it through those years.

A competition office with a research habit

Lorraine Beaudoin and Christophe Joud have run their Lausanne office together since 2014. Both studied at ENSA Lyon and EPFL. From 2010 to 2020 they researched collective housing at EPFL’s LTH2 laboratory under Bruno Marchand. The EPFL listing for Beaudoin’s lecture of 12 May 2026 puts their model in one sentence: their projects and achievements are «mainly the result of public competitions». Ten years of research on how people live together, carried into a practice that lives from the Wettbewerb, explains a lot about how this house was made.

The city’s participatory process began in 2016. According to espazium, the brief required geogenic and biogenic materials, a lively house for many uses, and part of the building made with residents. Forty-seven teams applied and four were shortlisted. Residents drawn by lot advised the jury. Team MIKADO won with «Les cabanes du Loup»: the architects together with Ratio Bois (Écublens) and 2M Ingénierie civile (Yverdon-les-Bains).

Bring in the people who know the material

Peter Braun of Normal Office in Fribourg and Julien Hosta of CRAterre advised on earth. Vincent Robin, a pisé mason from Isère, trained the rammed-earth crew of ADV Construction from Penthaz. According to the city’s project page, about 70 residents pressed 2,400 raw-earth bricks over six days in workshops in summer 2024. The neighbours did not only advise on their community house. They built part of it with their own hands.

The facade is a timber frame filled on the inside with 30 cm of prefabricated hemp-lime and closed on the outside with a 17 cm hemp-lime layer rammed on site, with no separate insulation. The building cost about CHF 9.5 million.

←TODAY: A 2026 Lausanne public house carries 45 cm walls rammed from its own excavation. →3012: In Zurich-3012 the soil report is the first page of the material list, not an annex to the geotechnics. Fulcrum: The dig becomes a resource only when someone tests it before the competition model is frozen.

Earth asks for something in return: a dry site, organised around it. Beaudoin told espazium she had never built a building «das so viel kommentiert wurde und wird», one so widely discussed. She named her lesson for next time plainly: enclose the whole site from the start and work with a mobile crane, to keep the clay out of the rain. Here is the trade-off, stated by the people who carried it: earth that costs nothing at the dig still costs weather protection and programme time, and an office has to price both at competition stage, not discover them on site.

PAZ covered the same instinct when Schmid Schärer won Meggen’s pool by building into the hole already there. In our own Werkhalle on the Sihlquai, the competition folder still files the Baugrund report apart from the site plan, as if they belonged to different projects. La Louve is a quiet argument for putting them on one page.

Atelier: For a 10- to 20-person office that lives from competitions, material sourcing now belongs to the concept stage, and AI tools that draft schedules quickly do not answer whether the ground under the site can become a wall. Monday move: add a «site-sourced» line to your competition material list template and fill it with the excavation volume from the site model before the first massing review.

Hack: Check at competition stage whether your own dig can cover the earth walls you are drawing. Three lines of Python compare the usable excavation volume against a 45 cm pisé wall. The numbers are placeholders for your site, not La Louve’s figures; replace usable with the share the soil lab actually approves.

# can the dig become the wall? (placeholder inputs)
dig_m3, usable = 1200, 0.35          # excavation volume, lab-approved share
wall_m3 = 85.0 * 4.0 * 0.45          # wall length x height x 45 cm pisé
print(f"earth cover: {dig_m3 * usable / wall_m3:.1f}x the wall")

PAZ Takeaway: PAZ can help a competition office carry this check into the model: an Archicad property set that tags each element as site-sourced, bought-in or reused, with the excavation volume linked from Grasshopper through the PAZ Grasshopper↔Archicad Library, so the material ratio updates with every massing change instead of living in a separate spreadsheet.

The city printed its own method on the first-stone release: «Le bon matériau au bon endroit et de la bonne manière», the right material in the right place and in the right way. Before your next competition entry, have the site’s excavation soil tested so it can enter the material list.