Photographs by Jim Stephenson

Studio in the Woods is an annual summer workshop convened by Piers Taylor (Invisible Studio) with Kate Darby (Kate Darby Architects), Meredith Bowles (Mole Architects) and Gianni Botsford (Gianni Botsford Architects). The event is an ongoing education and research project that enables participants to test ideas through making at 1:1.

The workshop has been held on a number of UK sites, always in rural environments. This year the Studio in the Woods was generously hosted by the Wyre Community Land Trust with funding provided by the Guild of St George, and additional funding was granted by the Ruskin in Wyre HLF project. Working in 6 groups with 10 - 12 people per group, each team explored ideas for future uses for the oak grown in the low and mid-grade oak in this forest., over the course of 4 days. 

This year, Zoë Berman joined Shin Egashira leading a workshop with a diverse group of participants. Collectively the group brought together a range of skills, expertise and knowledge from differing fields.

Working together, we developed a timber ‘nest’ structure, using only the waste timber from the forest floor to create an enclosure within the woodland. We developed a method of timber stacking using similar techniques used in dry stone walling. The title of the project, 'The Dragon's Nest' was given to the structure by one of the woodland sawyers young children. 

This year groups were lead by practitioners including:

Barbara Kaucky and Susanne Tutsch (Erect Architecture)
Je Ahn (Studio Weave) Lee Ivett (Baxendale) Lynton Pepper (Architecture00)
Shin Egashira (Architectural Association), Zoë Berman (Studio Berman)
Guan Lee (Grymsdyke Farm/Bartlett) Hannah Durham (Cullinan Studio)
Charley Brentnall (Carpenter Oak) Carolina Vasilikou (University of Reading)
Tim Price (Price and Myers) and Jack Hawker (Momentum) 
With visiting critics Niall McLaughlin, Robert Mull, Peter Clegg and Ted Cullinan

Studio in the Woods is now part of the Global Free Unit - which has a number of active ‘classrooms’ operating globally, where student learning takes place outside of the framework of conventional academic institutions.