In the former Gunboat Sheds at Holmen, the architectural office Jespersen Nødtvedt is conducting ongoing experiments with clay through three full-scale mock-ups. The workshop is open to the public, offering insight into a series of material tests and spatial studies that explore clay as both fired and unfired, handmade and industrially produced - used wherever each form makes the most sense.

The project continues the office’s interest in homogeneous building techniques and the Danish tradition of hollow brick wall construction, while responding to today’s urgent need to reduce CO₂ emissions in material production. Rather than seeking an ultimate or purely “sustainable” solution, the investigations aim to combine the best properties of both fired and unfired clay into hybrid systems that are at once robust, low-impact, and architecturally rich.

Through drawings, models, and 1:1 mock-ups, the project tests ways of reintroducing clay into contemporary masonry construction in meaningful, contextually grounded ways. The office explores how different types of clay blocks - fired and unfired - might coexist in hybrid wall constructions that respect the logic of Danish masonry, where the wall’s thickness, texture, and performance vary continuously within a single, coherent material system.

Each mock-up acts as both experiment and argument: a fragment of a potential building, where clay is reconsidered not as nostalgia or novelty, but as a material of continuity and reinvention. The work questions where industrial production can meet craft, and how material honesty and structural simplicity can coexist with the demands of a low-carbon future.