Martian Relics Combines Rammed Earth With Salvaged Steel
Designer Roc H Biel has created Martian Relics, a collection of five speculative domestic objects that explores how human life might change on Mars. The project considers what would happen to our beliefs, knowledge, self-image, memories and access to essential resources in an environment defined by scarcity.
Rather than proposing a practical way to live on Mars, the collection uses this imagined future to question consumption and environmental responsibility on Earth. It challenges the idea that humanity could escape the consequences of resource depletion by settling another planet.
Ancient Materials Meet Space Technology
The collection comprises a flowerpot, plate, mirror, water filter and window. Each piece combines rammed earth with salvaged stainless steel, bringing together one of humanity’s earliest construction methods and a material associated with industrial and space technology.
Rammed earth traditionally uses locally available clay, sand and gravel. On Mars, Biel imagines that scarcity would make this principle of building with materials found nearby essential once again. Martian minerals could consequently become raw materials for both architecture and everyday objects.
Biel used industrial mould-making techniques to create unusually intricate rammed-earth forms. Moulds consisting of up to twelve parts accommodate a continuous single-axis pressing process, which compacts the material layer by layer. The stainless steel components include upcycled valves, pressurant tanks, cable and stacked sheet-metal offcuts. These elements evoke fragments of rockets and satellites repurposed for domestic life. In this scenario, recycling is no longer an environmental virtue or aesthetic choice, but a basic condition for survival.
Objects Shaped By Scarcity
The five objects translate broad human concerns into familiar household forms. Last Offering, a flowerpot modelled on a headstone with a double cross, holds four dried flowers in salvaged pressurant tanks. It considers whether the disappearance of nature could transform religious beliefs and renew reverence for Gaia, the personification of Earth.
The plate Gravity Well incorporates a representation of gravitational pull, imagining how knowledge of space could become embedded in everyday design. Meanwhile, the antenna-inspired mirror Faded Signal returns a slightly blurred reflection. It questions current beauty standards and proposes a future in which knowledge and survival skills influence how people perceive themselves and others.
Access to basic resources forms the focus of Slow Water. Its satellite-like structure allows water to pass through several filtration and sedimentation stages before it reaches a cup. The deliberately slow process turns drinking into a ritual and makes the value of every millilitre visible.
Finally, Eroded Horizon presents a faded image of the Mediterranean Sea and blue sky within a deep rammed-earth window frame. Visible only when illuminated, the distant landscape represents a future in which nature survives mainly as a distorted memory.
Through its combination of mineral materials, reclaimed metals and symbolic forms, Martian Relics asks what humanity truly needs to preserve. Ultimately, the collection presents material scarcity on Mars as a warning about how resources are used on Earth today.
Source: Roc H Biel