Seeding Change - Visionary Timber Architecture at Hooke Park, 1981-2001

Hooke Park in west Dorset is a home to a nexus of progressive approaches to forestry, architecture, engineering and education. Now under the stewardship of the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture, this woodland campus was established by John Makepeace and the Parnham Trust in the early 1980s to propose new forms of timber construction using locally sourced roundwood. Their project resulted in three pioneering buildings - the Prototype House, the Workshop and Westminster Lodge - designed by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, Frei Otto, Edward Cullinan Architects and Buro Happold. Seeding Change draws on a rich archive of photographs, drawings and documents to tell the stories of these structures, tracing the evolution of their material-led and research-driven approach to design, grounded in a living landscape. By examining how three such radical experiments in roundwood were made real through collaborations between foresters, engineers and architects, the book offers both a detailed case study and an invitation to reimagine how we build. With contributions from John Makepeace, Andy Goldsworthy, Ingrid Schroder, Carlos Peters, Zachary Mollica, Finbar Charleson, Jack Cardno, Wyatt Armstrong, Dmitrii Federov. Edited by Kate Davies & Anna Lisa Reynolds.