Faculty and recent alumni present at Earth USA 2026

October 27, 2026

BY Rawad nahhas

Associate Professor Adam Marcus, Delaram Khoshhal (M.Arch *26), and Lydia Desormeaux (MSHP *26) presented research at the 13th International Conference Earth USA 2026 on Architecture & Construction with Earthen Materials in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Earth USA 2026, organized by Adobe in Action, drew researchers, practitioners, and artists from around the world to Santa Fe in September. Three members of the Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment community presented posters, each looking at Louisiana’s building traditions from a different angle.

Marcus and Khoshhal presented ongoing research on 3D printed clay reinforced with bagasse, the fibrous byproduct of industrial sugarcane processing. Their paper, “Printing a Regional Legacy: Clay-Bagasse Composites and Louisiana’s Circular Traditions of Bio-Based Construction,” places the work within the Gulf South’s history of geo- and bio-based materials. That history includes bousillage, the clay-and-Spanish-moss infill of French Creole walls, and the Celotex plant near New Orleans, which turned bagasse into insulating fiberboard. Louisiana now produces more than four million metric tons of bagasse each year, much of it burned or landfilled.

The team mixed processed bagasse into two clay bodies of differing mineralogy at five concentrations, from 0 to 10 percent. They printed prototypes by paste extrusion, using computationally generated toolpaths, and scaled them toward stackable masonry units. Drying-shrinkage and thermal studies, the latter using a custom hot-box apparatus, followed. The goal is a tunable masonry unit whose porosity and infill can be calibrated for breathable, low-carbon walls suited to a humid subtropical climate. Next steps include structural testing and systematic variation of unit geometry.

The project received fabrication support from Nick Licausi, TuSABE Director of Fabrication, and Jeremy Jernegan of Newcomb Art Department. Grow Dat Farm supplied the bagasse. Sponsors included the Tulane Center on Climate Change and Urbanism and the Bywater Institute for Climate Adaptation.

Desormeaux presented research from her Master of Science in Historic Preservation thesis, “Ápulusleh to Bousillage: Remembering the Indigenous History of Louisiana’s Vernacular Architecture.” Her poster argues that Louisiana’s earthen architecture, often read as a French colonial tradition, also reflects Indigenous material practices that have been marginalized in academic literature and public memory. Tracing a timeline from the Poverty Point era through colonial-era accounts to the present, she shows how the term bousillage came to stand in for a longer, local history of building with earth and fiber.