Projects

Lecture theatre

Hill Holt Wood is a project working with youth who aren’t achieving in school or otherwise not fitting into the system well. The project is based in a wood in the east Midlands and is entirely ‘off grid’ so the use of things like compost toilets are ‘fitted as standard’. They embarked on an ambitious new build to increase their capacity and allow bigger visitor and learning groups into the wood. It was natural for them to look to the materials they have on site for their basic building elements.
We have dug up many buildings over time but Hill Holt Wood was very interesting because every trial pit we dug produced different material. Mixing the product of each trial pit we managed to find a very useful building material. Bryce and the team did a great job in getting some 250 tonnes mixed thoroughly and dried out in the middle of a wood in the east midlands, no mean feat.
It took us around 10 years to start building elements with the complexity involved in this build. It took us a week to teach the team in the woods. The building is a ten metre internal diametre and a twelve sided polygon outside. Most of the walls are extrenal and are insulated externally, with just a small proportion fully internal and therefore left exposed. This meant that the walls where both circular and facetted, so changed in thickness from a minimum 350mm to a maximum 500mm.
On top of this wall was placed a double reciprocal roof, cut from logs harvested from the wood.