Grunt
“Grunt” investigates war-related soil pollution in Ukraine—while rethinking earth as a local material for climate-conscious reconstruction, Grunt bridges two critical concerns arising from post-war zones: the environmental consequences of warfare and the urgent need for reconstruction aligned with climate goals.
Soil
Topic
Location
Berlin, Germany
Kharkiv, Lviv, Ukraine
November 2024 - July 2025
Duration
Anna Pomazanna and Mykhailo Shevchenko
Team
Purpose
Grunt (Ukrainian for soil, earth) is a project by Anna Pomazanna and Mykhailo Shevchenko that investigates warfare-contaminated soils in Ukraine as a potential local material for climate-conscious reconstruction. The project confronts two interlinked questions: Can polluted soils be safely reused as construction material, and can their pollutants be immobilized to protect both people and environment?
Research
Soil samples from the Kharkiv Oblast collected in November 2024 revealed high concentrations of heavy metals such as cadmium and arsenic. What began as an exploration of remediation strategies for earth-based construction quickly evolved into a deeper inquiry into the very definition of pollution: how it is framed, regulated, and socially managed.
Legal thresholds classify contaminated soils as waste, sending them to landfills and putting hazardous substances precisely where they pose the greatest risk to the soils that sustain us and the water we drink. Grunt challenges this paradigm with a radical proposal: rather than reject pollution, what if architecture could “tame” it?
Grunt imagines a society that ceases to displace its toxic legacy and transforms pollution into an architectural substance that acts as a healing agent, safeguarding the landscape.
Results
Following our research, we came up with two strategies that would allow us to use contaminated soil.
The first strategy is dilution.
Since concentration is the key indicator of pollution, we aimed to dilute contaminated material by incorporating secondary raw materials with lower pollutant levels or different contaminants. To optimize the mixture, we used washed sand from a soil washing facility to enhance the natural sand content.
The second strategy is encapsulation.
This strategy involves the development of large-scale design details for building elements engineered to securely contain materials contaminated with heavy metals. A key feature is the prototype of a ‘filter house,’ encircled by a rain garden equipped with an underground filtration system. This system gradually leaches contaminants from the exterior walls, effectively managing pollution over time.
The final stage of the project was the construction of a full-fledged prototype—a pavilion made with compressed earth blocks in Lviv.
Collaborators
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Construction
Pavilion
It is the Ukraine’s very first structure made of compressed earth blocks (CEB)! It is now standing in Lviv as a memorial to Rafał Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the term genocide. Materiality is the central symbol of the pavilion: built from local soil, it evokes a direct link to the city’s history and its tragedies. All materials were sourced within a 20-kilometer radius of Lviv, Ukraine.
Education
Sustainable Materials and Structures
Sustainable Materials and Structures is an elective course at Kharkiv School of Architecture. The main topic of the course is a full cycle of the building materials production - from the extraction and processing of raw materials to the final product with all intermediate stages.
Education
Material research:
Earth
Material research: Earth is an elective course at Kharkiv School of Architecture. The main topic of the course is the soil-based materials and their potential for widespread use in construction, as well as the topic of contaminated soils and their potential use as building materials.