Making Laboratory - London Metropolitan University

Making Laboratory

About this project

Starting from experimental making with a limited range of materials, learn to make building elements which fit loosely together to form buildings which sit appropriately within the slowly changing physical and institutional topography of the city.

Since 1985, over 100 week-long courses have been run by London Met's Maurice Mitchell at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales. The course aims to provide students with the opportunity to design and make buildings using materials found onsite or available locally. Skills are site-based, focusing on those of mason (wet trades) and carpenter (dry trades). Many of the research-led live projects in the ARCSR area have extrapolated building elements and research methods which have emerged from this course.

A hands-on construction project runs throughout the 5-day course. This involves all students in a cyclic process of experimentation and focused group criticism followed by modifications to the original proposal. As the course progresses and the skills, ambitions and interactions of the students become clear, a built form evolves which is quite unique. The final product, which is left standing as students leave, is more a large-scale model than a finished building. Its form, never predictable at the start of the process, is a way of learning about the process by which technology and human agency are transformed into a culture of making with a civic and ethical content.

The seeming triviality of the objects being made is banished within the group as the work proceeds by constant self-conscious communication and iterative endeavour. Meaning is attached to the building elements being made by clearly identifying prototypes and other precedents. This consolidates the learning process. The end of the course is marked with a review conducted by the students in which lessons learned are made explicit.

A worksite at the Centre for Alternative Technology

Images

Earthblock Arch and Timber Formwork

Thin Pole Roof Structure

Transporting Hyperbolic Paraboloid Roof to Site

Ferrocement Gutter Fixed to Larch Pole Frame

Earth Balls

Lightweight Roof

Timber Lamella Roof

Assembling the parts

Lamella Roof and Slate Wall, Stairs and Bench

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Plastering Straw Bales

Recycling Packing Case Timber Stair and Suspended Floor

Students making at CAT, Wales

A Way of Building: Using locally sourced materials

A Way of Building: Using locally sourced materials is a 5 day workshop course at the Centre of Alternative Technology (CAT), Machynlleth, Wales from 23 to 26 July 2021.

Contact

b.tang@londonmet.ac.uk

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