By MEGAN DOOLEY

Islanders are invited tomorrow for a roll in the clay with the owners of the new Flatbread pizza restaurant, which will share a building with Nectar’s nightclub at the airport this summer. They’ve already laid the foundation for the 20-ton clay oven that will fire their gourmet pizzas, but they’re inviting the community to pitch in with the rest.

“It kind of makes it a community oven, and a community project,” said Flatbread owner Jay Gould. “We’ve always done this, as a tradition,” he said of building ovens at the restaurant’s other locations, in places like Maui and British Columbia. “It’s kind of like an old-fashioned barn-raising,” he said.

Mr. Gould said everyone benefits from the activity. The Flatbread people don’t have to pay to bring in clay masons, and community members get to put their stamp on an enormous oven that they may revisit once the restaurant opens its doors. “It’s fun,” said Mr. Gould. “People have told me it’s one of the most fun things they’ve ever done.”

The clay inside the large buckets laid out for the amateur bricklayers won’t be local to the Vineyard, although Mr. Gould had hoped it could be. The timing just wouldn’t allow it. Instead, they imported clay from Boston, but they’re trying something new this time to mimic the Island’s colorful clay cliffs. “We’re going to try to have a multicolored dome, just like the cliffs of Gay Head,” he said, made up of individual bricks of white and red and yellow and gray.

The brick-building begins at 10 a.m. tomorrow at the Nectar’s property. Mr. Gould expects the project to take two or three hours, if 50 people show up to help out. First they’ll mix the clay with sand and straw and then mold the soft clay bricks, into about the size of a football. And after a little bit of puzzle work, they’ll end up with the clay dome of the pizza oven.

“It’s based on an old Quebec bread oven that they used to use about 500 years ago, made by hand,” said Mr. Gould of the design. “It’s a primitive oven but it works fine.”