“Gradients of the Earth” proposes a new housing scheme that wants to be an alternative to the way we live as much as a universal prototype that encourages us to reflect on the stagnation of our contemporary living and the impossibility of separating what we, instead, conceive as opposed and disconnected: the ‘man-made’ and the ‘natural’; the ‘clean’ and the ‘dirty’; an excavation site far away from the city and a built tower in a dense urban centre. The project aims to highlight the fact that the disconnection between these extremes is an illusion and that, differently, these elements belong to one single spectrum and are part of one same process. These elements, essentially, make up one gradient. A gradient that stretches from metal to soil. This new awareness, crucial for the project, moves from a conceptual level to a lived experience. People are brought through a journey of discovery: inverted preconceptions and unexpected relationships create a tension between elements from the process of construction to the materiality of the architecture, to the way of life across two buildings in constant dialogue: a metal ‘hole’ and an earth ‘tower’.