Studio in the Woods  – 2018

Studio in the Woods is an ongoing education and research project established in 2005. It was founded and is convened by Piers Taylor (Invisible Studio) with Kate Darby (Kate Darby Architects), Meredith Bowles (Mole) and Gianni Botsford (Gianni Botsford Architects) as a vehicle to test ideas through making at 1:1. Each year, Taylor, Darby, Bowles and Botsford have been joined by a number of other practitioners and academics in leading workshops with students over 3 or 4 days in summer time.

These workshop leaders include Barbara Kaucky and Susanne Tutsch (Erect Architecture) Je Ahn and Maria Smith (Studio Weave) Lee Ivett (Baxendale) Lynton Pepper (Architecture00) Shin Egashira (Architectural Association) Lina Gotmeh (Lina Gotmeh Architecture) Toby Lewis and Akos Juhasz (Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios) Fergus Feilden (Feilden Fowles) Guan Lee (Grymsdyke Farm/Bartlett) Hannah Durham (Cullinan Studio) Charley Brentnall (Carpenter Oak) Zoe Berman (Berman Studio) Carolina Vasilikou (University of Reading) Tim Price (Price and Myers) and Jack Hawker (Momentum). Visiting critics are Niall McLaughlin, Robert Mull, Peter Clegg and Ted Cullinan.

Studio in the Woods is now part of the Global Free Unit Network which has a number of ‘classrooms’ globally where power is handed back to the student and learning can take place outside of the framework of conventional academic institutions.

Studio in the Woods lands in a different context each year, and has taken place in a number of different locations around the UK including the woodlands managed as part of the Invisible Studio Project, where Studio in the Woods started.  This year, Studio in the Woods decamped to the Wyre Forest and was hosted by the Wyre Community Land Trust with funding provided by the Guild of St George with additional funding from the Ruskin in Wyre HLF project as part of a strategy to explore future uses for the timber from the Wyre Forest.

The 2018 Studio in the Woods ran from 5-8 July, and the 6 groups with 60 students were:

1. Kate Darby/Gianni Botsford who continued their theme of ‘constructed analysis’ regarding sunlight and daylight by mapping shadows around a group of buildings in the forest to determine strategies for the future placement of buildings.
2. Lee Ivett/Je Ahn/Lynton Pepper/Tim Lucas who built an 18m cantilevered Belfast truss out of small section oak.
3. Barbara Kaucky/Susanne Tutsch who designed an enclosure to allow sunlight into the forest floor to encourage biodiversity
4. Guan Lee/Hannah Durham/Adam Holloway who constructed a series of musical ‘instruments’ including a robotic piano that played a series of sounds from the woodland through a giant timber speaker
5. Meredith Bowles/Charley Brentnall/Piers Taylor who construced a ‘room for a tree’ from curved timber with no commercial value designed to provide an alternative reading of the tree canopy
6. Shin Egashira/Zoe Berman who constructed a ‘nest’ from waste timber from the forest floor designed as a place of enclosure within the woodland.

See gallery of previous years Studio in the Woods HERE

Watch film of 2017 Studio in the Woods HERE