TERRApia is a team of two architects, Alina Negru and Alessandro Serra, who explore the potential of earth as a construction material and promote its relevance for the crafted architecture. Their main challenges are the adaptation of the rural constructive practices to the contemporary building realities and the recovery and transmission of local technical knowledge with earth, in order to improve the living conditions of the earthen homeowners.
Alina Negru is a Romanian architect specialised in earthen architecture at Craterre – ENSAG Grenoble (France). Since 2010 she has been practicing as an architect and as a cultural manager, member of REcult, an association focused on sensitising the general public towards its architectural heritage and local knowledge related to traditional building techniques. She is currently studying, during her Ph.D. at the West University of Timisoara, the earthen constructive practices in the region of Banat, Romania. She is involved in various initiatives that identify and promote the existing local resources for sustainable development of this region, within the research group RHeA (Research Centre for Cultural Heritage and Anthropology), a young independent scientific research unit inside the W.U.T.
Alessandro Serra is an Italian architect specialised in earthen architecture at Craterre – ENSAG Grenoble (France) that was involved in different earthen architecture projects, like the restoration of the earthen heritage in the Figuig Oasis in Morocco and its enlistment in the World Monuments Fund. In Peru he has conducted research on earthquake-resistant earthen design, at the PUCP (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) of Lima. From 2015 he has worked in Romania on projects promoting earthen architecture in the historical region of Banat, promoting it with an interdisciplinary approach, like the ones mentioned above.
Alina Negru and Alessandro Serra are members of the cross-border organising team (Romania, Hungary, Serbia) of Regio Earth, the first itinerant festival about earthen architecture, design and art of Central and South-Eastern Europe.