Architecture and Landscape Symposium October 2024
October 3rd & 4th 2024
I recently had the pleasure of attending a two-day symposium at The Serge Hill Project hosted by Tom Stuart-Smith Studio over near Kings Langley. It was a great and inspiring two days exploring and understanding the use of earth as a sustainable material and the processes, benefits and techniques we can all integrate into our practices. Whilst it is never easy to take two days away from the office, I am so glad I did and shared this amazing CPD event with lots of other talented designers.
The venue for the symposium was at The Apple House, an amazingly beautiful new piece of architecture designed by Ben Stuart-Smith of the design collective Okra. It was created using almost entirely natural materials for the main structure including hempcrete walls, split oak cladding and an unfired clay floor.
Adjoining The Apple House is the acclaimed Plant Library which has been set up as a testing ground for a huge range of beautiful plants with around half of the area planted into a foot of sand. It’s an amazing resource that I plan to come back to time and time again. This is a unique and extensive educational resource for anyone interested in plants and planting design, and I highly recommend a visit. Book your tickets here.
To kick off the day, Tom Stuart-Smith made everyone welcome and introduced the narrative for the two days.
Day 1
A focus on Architecture and we were fortunate to hear brilliant speakers from a wide range of practices. They included:
- Paloma Gormley of Material Cultures (working to introduce bio-based materials and minimally processed materials into construction)
- Ben Stuart-Smith, Okra (Architect of The Apple House)
- Edmund Fowles of Feilden Fowles (Architects taking a ‘low tech’ approach to projects)
- Dr Muirne Kate Dineen, Natural Pigments (Colour artist working with pigments)
- Izra Thomson & Bee Rowan, Natural Building @wanderingearthbuilder (Earth builders with natural materials)
Day 2
A focus on Landscape Architecture and included the following speakers:
- Loretta & Ben Bosence of Local Works (Working with excavation materials sourced from construction works)
- Tom Stuart-Smith (needs no introduction, a wealth of experience with landscapes of all shapes and sizes)
- Sarah Price (award winning landscape designer. Stunning work and one of my favourite talks of the two days.)
- Cleve West (award winning landscape designer)
- Tom Massey (award winning landscape designer)
There were so many positives to take home from the event and the main one for me was not being afraid to experiment with earth as a resource for creating buildings and landscapes. This is so important in our current climate where all natural resources need to be given maximum respect. It can of course often be site or client specific and it’s important not to use earth etc for the sake of it, especially if you have to import lots of natural materials to the site. Transport and machinery can have a big negative impact on carbon omissions. Analyse your existing site and assess what materials can be re-purposed, whether this be recycling old concrete, bricks or using earth for rendering walls. Even the smallest of interventions helps towards the whole.
I noted a large proportion of the speakers often use similar materials such as straw, cob, stone, lime, wood, recycled aggregatesand strocks in their work. A strock is a structural block of clay rich earth and chopped straw. They can be used as the inner skin of an external wall and for internal load bearing with companies like H.G. Matthews producing them. Hand crafted mud walls using straw, mud and sand were also a big feature of the talk with great ‘hands on’ demonstrations outside in the courtyard from Izra and Bee.
I was also struck how versatile lime mortar and render is for a huge range of applications. It’s protective qualities help to open up more possibilities for natural ways of building in the landscape, especially walling. A memorable quote from the event came from Bee Rowan. She commented that for natural walls to last a lifetime they need to have ‘good boots and a top hat’, i.e. strong foundations and a protective capping. Simple but true!
A ‘low tech’ approach to designing and building spaces of the future was made very real at this event and it showed how possible it can be across all sorts of projects regardless of scale. Creative collaboration between architects, landscape architects and clients are vital and this in turn will help us all to move towards lower carbon way of being.
