Architectural Association School of Architecture

Students of Design & Make develop new and alternative modes of architectural design that integrate full-scale making. Based at Hooke Park, the AA’s woodland campus in Dorset, the students inhabit an environment that combines studio, workshop, building site and forest, as part of a wider rural community of rich craft tradition. Working within the framework of 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 building material and to Hooke Park’s woodworking facilities, timber building technologies are at the core of the programme’s agendas.
Design & Make is a full-time, 16-month MArch graduate design programme open to postgraduate 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 site, our physical contact with the materials of building, and reactively through the processes of fabrication and construction. The ambition for the programme is to work without a distinction between designing and making, so that architectural solutions emerge that would not be possible within the usual constraints of the design office and the abstraction of representation. The 2011/12 academic year will carry forward last year’s brief for a largespan assembly workshop, by designing and building a pair of small student accommodation lodges. Through a deep engagement in the cultural, societal and landscape contexts of the English rural condition, students will be expected to manifest compelling responses to the issues of dwelling, material, place and environment.

The D&M MArch 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; the Core Project is dedicated to individually themed fullscale, site-specific design-and-make explorations at Hooke Park. Design approaches and skills developed in the first term are applied in the second term as the team-based design of the Hooke Park projects. The four seminar courses are focused on the cultural theory of making as design; the agendas of ruralism, sustainability and place; fabrication and construction technologies; and the theories of collective design.