Studio 2: GRAFT

Thursday, 25 June 2020

Back in the Ashdown Forest, an environment of privileges, ecological bliss, space, simplicity and community; our thoughts and architectural enquiries this year ride roughshod over the podzol, seeking traction in a fast changing world.

Attempts to re-present the intangible heritage of sites with programme, physically, while arguing for acceptance of towers to be part of the answer, have generated such rich conversations and as a studio, committed design propositions meet lofty ambitions with a fearlessness expected of us as pioneers in this new era.

We couldn’t have imagined the twists and turns that shine new light on the viability of conventional cities, coming slightly too late for us to really interrogate as students of a generation ready to build better.

Our 2020 studio brief began with Great Greta’s address to the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit in New York City on 23rd September 2019.

We finish with a clumsily penned re-edit, re-contextualising the voice of youth (with good intent) in a new layer of complexity that will continue to challenge us into the foreseeable future.

This is all wrong. We shouldn't be locked up here, we should be back in the studio, on the other side of the LED screen. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams, and my childhood, with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire communities are collapsing. Are we in the beginning of a mass extinc

The following are ‘Early Manifestos’, texts describing the studios ambitions for the year.