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Construction began on the pavilion in 2020 and is currently in “Phase 3” — creating the building shell, installing large windows and making formwork for habitats — according to the aquarium’s website.

When Andrade began casting the house’s first concrete columns and lintels in 2013, plywood formwork also began appearing in his artistic practice.

With the seven-foot sled half inside the tent, Ousland took a four-inch formwork nail, chosen for its double-head that makes for a surer grip with a Leatherman, and heated it over a stove flame.

She says there is a small, budding revival of the technique among a younger generation of Spanish architects, and their local bricklayers have done an impressive job – connecting the bricks to each other one at a time with sticky gesso mortar, miraculously suspended in air, without the need for scaffolding or formwork.

It looks like a labour-intensive process, but it was relatively cheap, quick and efficient; the architects say that a vaulted brick staircase can cost half the price of a concrete stair, because you don’t have to close the road for a cement truck or build wooden formwork, and the bricks can be carried and quickly laid on site by a couple of people.