AN reported last week on the yearly Cevisama ceramic fair in Valencia, Spain, and the award winning Harvard project, Extruded Tessellation: Ceramic Tectonics, of industrially produced clay extrusions from the university’s Material Processes & Systems Group. But it was not the only award-winning project of architectural interest at the fair.

Cevisama’s most important award went to the La Gavina School Gymnasium in Valencia. The structure was designed by architects Carmen Martinez Gregori, Carmel Gradoli Martinez, and Arturo Sanz Martinez.

The gym has a ceramic tile facade that acts as a screen, light diffuser, and acoustic barrier for the facility.

But a second student award had perhaps the most experimental use of ceramics and potential to create a new type of easily and cheaply reproducible urban space and form.

The project, Transhumant Renovation by Laura Alonso Blasco, proposes a shelter community for the migrant shepherds making their way along livestock routes. The scheme is also imagined as a place of refuge for any travellers that have reached the end of a stage of their journey along the livestock routes, paths, and trails.

It uses colorful small ceramic pieces that can be easily replicable as part of of a series of covered wooden huts that frame a central sheep-grazing plaza.