A day of talks and discussion will lead us into the woods, with conversations connecting forestry, ecology, material, craft, engineering and architecture. The symposium frames the ambitions and agendas of the AA Wood Lab: a forestry and architecture research initiative based at Hooke Park, the AA’s woodland campus in Dorset.
With its own working woodland, Hooke Park is the ideal location for large-scale experiments in timber architecture and for research that places the forest supplying this timber at the centre of the work. Forestry thinking is, necessarily, long-term thinking and the Wood Lab is uniquely positioned to interrogate and innovate across the timber supply chain, from saplings to building.
Working in collaboration with leading practitioners in the field, a central ambition of the Lab’s research is to explore long-term forestry strategies for Hooke Park – reflecting the fact that the impacts of decision-making in forestry can be measured in decades, if not centuries.
The Wood Lab seeks to align the evolution of the forest with the evolution of the campus at Hooke Park. In doing so, it contributes to an urgent and broader conversation within architecture around the use of timber, its possibilities, its challenges and its sustainability. A conversation about timber in architecture is fundamentally a conversation about forestry, ecology and climate.
The AA Wood Lab has been made possible thanks to the generous support of John Makepeace, who founded the Hooke Park campus as Director of the Parnham Trust (1982–2001).
