The main fabrication workshop at Hooke Park is housed in a remarkable arching structure designed by ABK and Atelier Frei Otto in the late 1980s with engineering by Buro Happold. Its 600 square metre space houses twelve benches and can typically be used by 16 students at any one time. Hooke Park’s workshop staff team – led by our workshop manager Charlie – have extensive experience in fabrication of all kinds and are available to support and assist students in their work. The Workshop is fully equipped with woodworking hand tools and power tools.

For specific inquiries about the workshop equipment, please contact hookepark@aaschool.ac.uk.

The ‘Big Shed’ Assembly Workshop provides a covered space of approximately 400 square metres for larger construction-scale work. The building has sliding access doors and the interior can be accessed using Hooke Park’s telehandler; a tower scaffold is available for working at height. The Assembly Workshop has three-phase power, a pneumatic compressor and portable dust extraction. The building also houses our Stenner resaw, as well as our KUKA robotic arm (‘Latoya’) and CNC milling machine. The work can be facilitated by a telehandler and various forms of lifting and fabrication equipment. The Assembly Workshop space is available to visiting groups by prior arrangement, as the space is often being used for Design and Make project work.

Hooke Park’s KUKA KR 150 robotic arm provides the ability to precisely fabricate artefacts, from small architectural details to full building scale. The robotic facilities and tooling are designed primarily to work with wood grown in Hooke Park. To process this non-standard material, the arm has been equipped with an extensive set of tools including chainsaws, bandsaws and a spindle router, while an integrated rotary lathe which functions as a seventh axis has been installed to increase the arm’s reach. Beyond wood, students have recently worked with the robotic team to create objects composed of various wild clays sourced directly from Hooke Park. A range of tools are continually in development as new projects emerge, and we are always open to further research proposals and collaborations from groups across the school.

Located 200m from Hooke Park’s main campus, the timber processing yard is where raw timber sourced from the surrounding woodland is initially prepared for use. The processing yard hosts the site’s large sawmill, which can be used to break down logs into square sawn sections. Our sawmill is a Wood-Mizer LT40 ‘Super Hydraulic' – a lightweight, fixed machine that can handle logs up to six metres in length and half a metre in diameter. This type of machine can take a ‘raw’ log from the forest and turn it into regularised, dimensioned sections that can be used in construction or processed further in the workshop.

Our fully enclosed darkroom was developed by Design and Make students as part of their Term 1 introductory studios. Sited between the territory of the workshop and the enveloping fabric of the forest, this small building is a meditation on the act of image-making. The darkroom enables AA students to explore the processes of analogue photography, and its front room can be used as a camera obscura.