Footprint

Toby Lewis from Feilden Clegg Bradley has sent Footprint this second report from SitW 2010:

Why not play with the real thing?

There is an emerging pedigree of architects working with students using making as a design tool; from Sam Mockbee’s Rural Studio in Alabama to Shin Egashira’s workshop in Koshirakura, Japan and Brian MacKay-Lyons’ Ghost Lab in Nova Scotia, soon to be followed by the AA’s own Design and Make residential Masters course at Hooke Park beginning next academic year.

In this country, Studio in the Woods, founded by Piers Taylor of Mitchell Taylor Workshop and now in its 5^th year, is a three day summer school where students working in groups of twelve or so, lead by architects, design and make structures specific to their place in the landscape, constructed from timber milled to their specification from locally felled trees. The event moved to a new site this year at New Barn Farm on the Isle of Wight, hosted by the Isle of Wight Architecture Centre, a new centre for the built environment on the Island founded by Joseph Kohlmaier earlier in the year.

Piers Taylor, Meredith Bowles and their students built a tree house which Ted Cullinan likened to a ‘boxcar from a Buster Keaton train crash’ that had landed half way up a tree. We watched extensive live testing of this structure (“keep jumping”) before Toby Maclean of Tall Engineers would allow all the temporary props and ropes, held by Charley Brentnall, to be removed. Walking inside the surprise was to find a tapered space giving a false perspective and two trees growing through, creating a screen to the vertiginous balcony at the end; a natural oratorical platform, as Ted demonstrated.

Erect Architecture’s Barbara Kaucky and WAG’s Cordula Weisser and their students named their group ‘rolling hills’ and, by exploring weaving and bending, produced an expressionist double curve perched on the side of the hill, a breaking wave of timber surf. This giant quiff was possible due to a network of tension ropes with one curve pulling the other into shape and vice versa. Its form enabled the wary and careful occupant to lie horizontally on a hill facing outwards or recline in the shade.

Gianni Botsford and Kate Darby’s group produced three freestanding pieces each attuned to different positions of the sun, at midday, 3pm and 6pm, the shiplap tapering enclosures around square mirrors blinkering the light from other times; though to the uninitiated they resembled a family of strange one eyed scuttling creatures on stick legs reminiscent of David Nash’s ‘Standing Frame’, which is also ostensibly a device to frame the environment while turning the frame itself into the actual work of art.

Studio Weave (Je Ahn and Maria Smith) and their group set out to create a place of ‘snuggling and sweating’. High on the hill they built a triangular pyramid which expanded to a pentagonal base enabling it to accommodate people around a central fire pit. Salamanders (fire lizards) carved inside were said to move about in the flickering firelight. At the rear this fire folly reached up to the sky with a timber crest like an Iroquois feather headdress while the front façade painted with whitewash, prepared from the chalk on which it stood, caught the warm orange glow of the setting sun.

I led a team whose explorations began from ‘not knowing’ and ranged across the landscape leading to their choosing to create a ‘place of solitude’, where foreground and middle ground recede, celebrating the liberating and de-cluttering experience of this open landscape. A horizontal walkway sets a line and level, taking you out above the grass as the hill falls away, to an end where you can dangle your legs and the structure supporting you can no longer be seen, so that you seem to be hovering in space with all at a distance.

While the ‘grown-ups’ were playing on the hills a group of thirty children aged from five to thirteen had their own Day in the Woods on Saturday afternoon led by engineers and architects Esther McKinney, Jo Lucas, Kat Davis, Anna Kerrane and Tabitha Pope: creating dens and fairy houses. Like the bigger projects it was possible to detect a gender bias with the boys’ dens made of straight sticks and the girls’ dens woven, bent and interlaced.

Ted Cullinan and Shin Egashira lead us round on the final day bringing reflection and comment to our labours. That so much can be achieved in such a short time surprises me each year. After such a concentrated burst, as Je Ahn commented  ‘the come down to normal life is indeed rather severe’.

There is a significant difference to be found if ‘making’ is included as part of ‘design’. When we design with pen and paper, or in CAD space, we are working with an abstraction and not the thing itself; whether that thing is ‘space’ or ‘place’ or ‘material’. The instructions and actions we can make, and the feedback we receive, are thus reduced or impoverished compared with working directly, with making. As Studio in the Woods demonstrates the ‘real thing’ is so much more.

Toby Lewis

‘Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things. I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction. At the point in time when concrete materials are assembled and erected, the architecture we have been looking for becomes part of the real world.’

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