Students of Design & Make use the realisation of buildings as a vehicle for design research, aiming to develop new and alternative modes of architectural design that integrate full-scale making. Based at Hooke Park, the AA’s woodland campus in Dorset, they inhabit an environment that combines studio, workshop, building site and forest, as part of a wider rural community of rich craft tradition. Working within a masterplan for the extension of the campus, student teams design and construct new experimental buildings at Hooke Park. With access to the woodland as a source of material and to Hooke Park’s woodworking facilities, timber building technologies underlie the programme’s agendas. MArch Design & Make is a full-time 16-month graduate design programme open to post-graduate students of architecture who wish to pursue design and realisation of alternative rural architectures. We test prototypical design propositions through their construction, developing design methodologies in which form is generated in response to the conditions and phenomena presented by the real-world site; our physical contact with the materials of building; and reactively through the processes of fabrication and construction. The ambition is to work without distinction between designing and making. Following 2010/11’s ‘Big Shed’ assembly workshop and the student lodge being constructed by the 2011/12 cohort, further campus buildings will be designed and built in 2013. The programme consists of design studio projects and seminar courses, construction-driven studios and the individual production of a thesis. The Induction Project provides an intensive introduction to the programme’s key design methodologies and the Core Project is dedicated to individually themed full-scale, site-specific design-and-make explorations at Hooke Park. Design approaches and skills developed in the first term are applied in the team-based design of a project in Term 2. The four seminars are focused on the theory of making as design; the agendas of ruralism, sustainability and place; fabrication and construction technologies; and the theories of collective design.

Programme Staff

Charley Brentnall is a timber-framing contractor who has played a pivotal role in the renaissance of timber framing in the UK. He founded Carpenter Oak & Woodland in 1988, is a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Bath and York and a member of the Timber Framers Guild, Carpenters Fellowship, Icomos and SPAB.

Martin Self is Director of Hooke Park. He is an engineer and designer who has taught design and theory at the AA since 2004. He worked at Ove Arup & Partners where he was a founding member of the Advanced Geometry Group, studied architectural theory at the AA, and has consulted with such practices as Zaha Hadid Architects and Antony Gormley Studio. With Charles Walker, he has led the design and production of the four AA Summer Pavilions (2006- 2009) through tutorship of AA Intermediate Unit 2.

Piers Taylor is an architect, a founding partner of Mitchell Taylor Workshop, a former Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge, the founder of the annual Studio in the Woods, and sits on the South West Design Review Panel. Taylor has won a number of awards for his work including the AJ Small Projects Award and a RIBA Award. He has studied with Glenn Murcutt and has been published extensively and internationally.

Application Information

Five-year professional architectural degree (BArch/Diploma equivalent degree)