Visible Studio, Bath, United Kingdom. Architect: Invisible Studio, 2014.

Link to image

Link to Set

A new studio that was built by the practice with the help of neighbours and friends (who were all paid an equal rate) using untreated and unseasoned timber grown in the woodland that surrounds the studio. The studio is on 2 floors – there is a 55m2 enclosed space accessed via a bridge from the slope, which is above an open workshop for the practice to make full scale models. No one who worked on the project had constructed a building before. The project was an exercise in establishing a system of building that could be constructed by unskilled labour, with minimal drawings, allowing ad hoc discoveries and improvisation to be embraced, and the tyranny of predetermined design to be escaped. The ‘mistakes’ of the unskilled team remain evident in the building, and no attempt was made to conceal them. All of the timber was milled over the 2 days that a mobile saw was booked, and the kit of parts was the trees that stood on the site of the studio. No other timber was used.