Excellence in Design: Wild Contexts

Our second Global Small Talk of 2021 explores excellence in design in wild contexts from across the globe. From rural Scottish highlands to the tropical climate of Costa Rica each of the projects featured were designed to respond and live in harmony within their own unique landscapes.

Join us on Friday May 21st at 12.30pm (BST) for a journey to these unique projects supported by presentations from the project architects. They will share their experiences and challenges of resourcing and applying materials in remote settings with consideration for local climate and use.

We are joined by host Kate Darby and speakers Piers Taylor of Invisible Studios, Gianni Botsford of Gianni Botsford Architects and Iain MacLeod from The Bothy Project.

Host

Kate Darby

Kate Darby is an RIBA chartered architect and principal of Kate Darby Architects. She studied architecture at the Bartlett and the Architectural Association and has combined practice with teaching since 1997. She has been leading an MArch design studio at WSA since 2012 looking at the connection between materials and place through the lens of making. In 2018 she started the Local Adaptation unit with Gianni Botsford.

She has been a design tutor for Design and Make at the AA in Hooke Park, she has led an undergraduate design unit at the Bartlett and taught MArch at Bath University. She is a founding member of the annual Workshop, Studio in the Woods and has been a collaborator in the design practice Invisible Studio. Kate Darby Architects is based in rural Herefordshire. In 2017 Kate Darby and David Connor won the AJ Small Project Award for their project, Croft Lodge Studio. This project also won a RIBA West Midlands Award and was a nominee in the Beazley Design of the Year 2017 Awards, hosted by the Design Museum.

Speakers

Piers Taylor

Piers Taylor is an architect and principal of Invisible Studio. He founded the now cult ‘Studio in the Woods’ where students test ideas through making at 1:1 alongside practicing architects and also (with Martin Self) the Architectural Association graduate program ‘AA Design and Make’ – where students spend 16 months designing and constructing buildings at the AA’s Hooke Park campus. Taylor was also a PhD candidate at the University of Reading and received their anniversary scholarship funding for his Doctoral research into making in an architectural context.

Taylor studied originally in Australia with Pritzker Prize winner Glenn Murcutt. He has designed a large number of seminal buildings and is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, which has been published widely and internationally. Invisible Studio have recently won a 2017 National RIBA Award for their Tree Management Centre at Westonbirt Arboretum - a project that also won three regional RIBA Awards. He lives in a prototypical self built house that won the AJ Small Projects Award and manages a 100 acre woodland as a research resource for the practice.

Taylor sits on the South West Design Review Panel, and is a regular contribution to a number of articles to Architectural Journals including the Architectural Review and the Architects’ Journal. Taylor is also one of the leading architectural broadcasters for the BBC. Taylor has held a number of academic positions including Unit Master at the Architectural Association & The University of Cambridge and has delivered numerous lectures nationally and internationally. His work has been published in multiple journals and featured in a number of independent documentaries.

Gianni Botsford

Gianni Botsford (Venice, Italy 1960) founded Gianni Botsford Architects in 1996 based in London, UK. He studied at Kingston University (82-85) and the Architectural Association, London (94-96), in Professor John Frazer’s Evolutionary Architecture Unit. He has taught at the Architectural Association, London Metropolitan University, and the Welsh School of Architecture, and is a founding group leader of the annual Studio in the Woods. The recipient of the RIBA’s Lubetkin Prize and Architectural Record Design Vanguard in 2008.

Iain MacLeod

Edinburgh-based architect Iain MacLeod runs his own small practice and is co-founder of Bothy Project, a network of small-scale, off-grid art residency spaces in distinct and diverse locations around Scotland where residents are able to use their time to explore creativity, landscape and living simply. The Bothy Project received an RSA award in 2011. Iain graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2006 and spent the next fifteen years working for practices both in the UK and internationally. In 2019 he set up his own architecture practice, Studio IMA, focussing on design led creative and residential sector projects across the UK. Iain is currently working on a range of products for Bothy Stores, the commercial arm of Bothy Project, in response to the demand for multipurpose small-scale structures suitable for a range of situations.

Please note this event will be recorded.

Watch all the previous events on the Global Small Talks playlist