Purcell Design Programme 2024: Timber at Hooke Park

Japanese joinery techniques have evolved to provide protection from earthquakes, somewhat counter-intuitively, not through tightness and rigidity but through a purposeful looseness. This looseness, which allows the buildings to absorb tremors, is carefully controlled by creating joints with the most exacting standards of craft. This dialogue between precision and looseness came to define this year’s Purcell Design Programme, which took place over four days at the Architectural Association’s campus at Hooke Park in Dorset.  

Embowered within its own 150 hectare forest, the campus has grown piecemeal, one extraordinary experimental building at a time, so that it is – tree-like - a living record of its own development. Crucially, the relationship between school and forest is reciprocal - the campus has been built from the matter which surrounds it, and in turn its presence there helps to sustain the forest. 

Eleven of us, drawn from Purcell’s Bristol, Cambridge, Canterbury, Manchester, York, London and Palace of Westminster studios, represented a regional approach to practice that the denizens of Hooke Park are themselves trying to foster. We were welcomed from our taxis by Emmanuel Vercruysse, Head of Physical Production and Academic Resources. Emmanuel’s easy-going but razor-sharp disposition was a beguiling mix, very much reflected in the environment that he has helped to foster around him. Previously Programme Director of the Design for Manufacturing course at the Bartlett’s Here East campus, Emmanuel’s research focusses on the manipulation of both software and hardware to achieve increasingly advanced methods of bespoke fabrication.  

On our first morning Emmanuel treated us to a tour of the many remarkable structures on site, starting in the refectory, where we had already enjoyed two delicious home-cooked meals. This remarkable tensile timber roofed building from 1987 is one of Frei Otto’s only surviving buildings in the UK, and represents the genesis of the campus. Initially conceived as a prototype house for rural contexts, the building’s use of spruce thinnings would go on to underpin the zero-waste approach taken across the campus.  

Next, passing the site’s gargantuan centralised biomass boiler, we were shown into the other surviving Frei Otto building – the cavernous slug-like workshop, designed by Otto and Richard Burton in 1989. Outwardly resembling a gridshell, this structure is in fact a series of compression arches, again formed from locally sourced spruce thinnings. The resulting top-lit vault houses a fully equipped timber workshop which was to be our home for the next few days, surrounded by the school’s current works in progress. These included a meticulously crafted 1:20 model of the campus’s next live project, a stilted shower-house resembling a skeletal upturned boat, and a trio of test-pieces exploring the outcomes of splicing a beech trunk to a cedar base. Emmanuel was keen to point out the release cut, practised by Japanese on green timber. We were also introduced to Charlie Corry-Wright, an excellent maker who would later guide us through a masterclass in the basics of hand-sawed joinery. 

Traversing the central yard, we entered the magnificent ’Big Shed’ Assembly Workshop, designed by students of Design & Make and Diploma Unit 19. Here, Emmanuel proudly introduced us to ‘Latoya,’ an apparently female six-axis robotic arm whose virtuosic ability to wield her arsenal of hacked chainsaws and bandsaws had brought Hooke Park’s most experimental structures to life. The fruits of her labours surrounded us, including one extraordinary hybrid of tree and lumber, recently exhibited at the Royal Academy. Two pieces – one very clearly a tree, the other a meticulously engineered truss – held together with graceful, dancelike sinuosity. The piece is one of several trusses destined to form the extension to the Wakeford Hall, whose skeletal, animalistic structure had been wrapped entirely in clingfilm to protect it from the winter. Now enclosed in a highly insulated timber skin which has been deftly made to appear not to touch the balletic structure, this dramatic and dynamic space is the apotheosis of the spatial complexity and advanced manufacturing afforded by the school’s unique processes.  

As well as such extraordinary structures – too many to list here - Hooke Park is home to a fascinating cast of characters, with whom we dined every evening. One prominent guest whose visit happily coincided with ours was the architect and author Richard Maddock, who delivered a talk to us recounting his extraordinary pilgrimage to Japan to study timber joints through the 2020 Churchill Fellowship. His beautifully illustrated talk, which inspired the opening paragraph of this piece, guided us through an itinerary encompassing craft, obsession, technology, philosophy, and spirituality. He showed us a draft of his forthcoming book, which assuredly reflects and expands on many of the themes at the heart of the school. 

One longstanding lynchpin of Hooke Park is Chris Sadd, the forest’s avuncular and spry custodian, who guided us wryly through the forest, reflecting on its history and development, and his hopes for its future. Drawing our attention to one particular beech tree – “what I would term a magnificent tree” – Chris’s pride in his charges was evident, reminiscent of a farmer’s love for animals reared for slaughter. Indeed – this metaphor was given further weight when we were told that Hooke Park’s ambition is to use 90% of a felled tree for construction – the silvicultural equivalent of nose-to-tail butchery. 

It became clear on our walk that we plant trees based on current needs, despite knowing that they will not be harvested in time to meet current demand. Poplars, Chris lamented, were planted for use as matches, but the UK’s match industry has since gone up in smoke. Likewise, the forest’s many stands (a group of trees planted together) of beeches were destined for furniture that was never made.  

How we manage forests in the face of dramatically changing climate is a burning question, with forest fires ravaging crops of trees and damaging soil. A sure measure against the spread of fire is diversity of planting – homogenous lines of identical species provide little defence against fire, while diverse areas such as hedgerows show more chance of surviving. This natural strategy is itself under threat however - previously, due to Hooke Park’s ideal placement and warm, wet weather, its foresters could be assured that a great variety of species would thrive. This selection is being slowly whittled down by changing climatic patterns, reducing options for resilience through diversity. 

Our tour of the forest ended, appropriately, at the sawmill. Here we were given a demonstration of how a tree is cut into lumber by Adrian Janssen and his American ‘mobile’ sawmill, a petrol-powered bandsaw mounted to a computer-controlled bed. The western red cedar on the day’s job list was duly dissected and laid out for our inspection – what could we tell about the tree, its life and recent history? Your author tentatively suggested that it had been grown in isolation – a speculation swiftly cut down by the sawyer. An ominous silence threatened to stymie our tutelage, before a keener-eyed colleague noticed the differing colours of the outer and inner faces of the freshly cut plank – an astute observation, in fact, of the effects of prolonged storage in wet conditions. Trust in our faculties restored, we were then shown the difference between heartwood and sapwood – essential knowledge for the specifier – and the distinction between loose and fixed knots. The quality of the tree before us was assessed and deemed fair, although afflicted by too many knots to make it high quality. In keeping with Hooke Park’s ethos of zero wastage, we eagerly seized the unwanted outer slab wood for use in the workshop.  

Having ingested so much information, our thoughts now turned to what we might practically achieve with all these extraordinary facilities at our disposal. Nick Chantarasak, whose longstanding connections to the Architectural Association has provided us with this extraordinary opportunity, challenged us to put our new-found knowledge to the test by constructing a bench. This bench would be built in halves by two teams: each half was to have no more than two legs, and should be incapable of standing. When assembled, the bench should be capable of supporting not only itself, but also three people. To add a superfluous dose of jeopardy to an already ambitious mix, your author insisted that the two halves be constructed in blind isolation, and then joined as ‘faits-accomplis,’ thus emulating the work we so often do at Purcell of working with preordained conditions. Crucially, both benches were to embrace the idea of ‘contrast,’ expressed through either material or process. 

The teams were created and immediately got to work. Using what spare material we could find – and absolutely no glue or screws, we promise – we mitred, mortised, flitched, routed, drilled, pegged, and scarfed our creations into being. When the two were presented to each other, the contrasting fruit of our cloistered processes was pleasingly clear.  

Cami, Gemma, Josh, Nora and Reuben had emphasised contrast of material, particularly between unworked and worked faces. They had found a sizable branch which they had sawn cleanly in two, and then spaced with slender straight-cut beams. The accompanying seat was again a pair of sapwood slab boards, rough on the underside and beautifully even on the other, joined with the timber equivalent of dog-ties.  

The other team, comprising Fiona, Tara, Tom, Nuria and myself, had resourcefully recycled the various practice pieces we had made on the previous day, laboriously joining them together to make a seat from coherent patchwork lattice of joints. This was supported by a two-legged composition which borrowed heavily from things we had seen during our stay at Hooke Park. Recalling the Japanese method of ‘ishibadate,’ or placing stone ‘shoes’ under posts to protect from groundwater, we had found an unassuming piece of unwanted concrete, and shaped a sturdy log to snugly rest on it, prosthesis-like. This more massive assemblage was offset at the other end of our composition by an improbably slender design, inspired by the work we had seen under construction around us. Embracing the Hooke Park maxim that where the branch meets the truck is the strongest part of the tree, we selected an unwanted slender forked branch, which was morticed and routed into the connecting beam. 

Once completed the two halves proved to be – either by miracle or design we are not sure – almost identical in height, and so then our attention turned to how to join them. Josh took the lead, and through a combination of determination, skill and fortune we were soon clustering round our conjoined creations. While members of Hooke Park’s community gathered round, Josh and I tentatively tested out its combined strength – curiously a third volunteer could not be found – and to our relief the bench withstood its ordeal without catastrophe. 

I would like to finish with some concluding thoughts. Architects are so often separated from the processes of making that we take such pains to describe, and the benefits of a practical knowledge of material and process were strikingly evident. The ingenuity on show at Hooke Park puts into practice so many things that we all know, but are glad to be reminded of; that practice and academia have a meaningful relationship, which when given time and resource results in material progress; that it is not only what materials we specify which matter, but where those materials have come from, and how they have been grown or made; and lastly, how materials are joined can not only contribute to their strength, but can also prolong their life. 

Further to these thoughts, however, my resounding memory of my time at Hooke Park is of the celebration of contrast and contradiction. Just as the Japanese joint has a careful blend of looseness and precision, the structures and experiments at Hooke Park demonstrate an agile and energetic curiosity for combining the seemingly irreconcilable. The struts for the Field Station’s space-frame roof, for example, started life as little more than windfall, foraged by hand and selected by eye, before being digitally scanned and analysed so that they can be machined by a robot into uniform components – outwardly unique but inwardly identical. Thus the previously useless byproducts of timber production – firewood at best – have been transformed into something not only useful but also experientially resonant. Standing beneath that extraordinary roof, as the sun sank into the rolling Dorset landscape, we were struck by how the wildness and inherent beauty of trees was being alloyed with the control and rigour afforded by technology. It was a pleasure and a privilege to spend time with Emmanuel, Kate, Chris and Charlie, and witness first hand their processes and wonderful creations. I think I speak for all of us when I say it was an experience I will cherish and continue to learn from. 

The last word should be one of thanks – to Nick, for initiating the idea and executing it so well, and to Purcell for having the generosity and vision to provide us with such an opportunity. The Purcell Design Programme is a vital moment to frame and focus our collective ambition - the challenge to our little contingent is that what we learned at Hooke Park will influence and enrich our work. Lastly, thanks to our new friends at Hooke Park and the AA. We hope that the relationship will continue to flourish, and that one day we will combine forces – one can only imagine what the fruits of such a collaboration would be.