PIONEERING THE POTENTIAL⁺ 2024 – Morning sessions

Fergus Feilden is a founder and director of FeildenFowles Architects who have been at the heart of the architectural turn to a lower tech, crafted and authentic materials led design ethos with projects like Homerton College Dining Hall, Cambridge and the Weston, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and whose current Black Robin Farm, is a new arts and education centre and eastern gateway to the South Downs National Park.

Charlotte Picard & Yannig Robert – Rosny-Sous-Prefecture – the Paris’ St Denis municipality are pioneering a radical natural materials agenda across its public building estate, spanning passive ventilation, locally sourced natural materials – particularly straw – and active community engagement, while supporting the growth of regional natural materials companies.

Kate Davies & Emmanuel Vercruysse co-lead the Architectural Association’s world-renowned Hooke Park school, in Dorset, with its 300-hectare woodland providing much of the source material for ongoing timber build experiments, including new tech augmented round wood design approaches for hyperlocal projects like the Robotic Woodchip Barn and the Field Station and will be showing the latest steps of this work at the conference.

Sebastian Rauch co-founder of Karak – the Vorarlberg, Austria, raku tiles crafts company is a spin-off of rammed earth builder Martin Rauch’s Lehmtonerde, and was founded by Rauch’s wife and son team, Marta and Sebastian Rauch. Sebastian and his colleagues have developed a suite of geometric tile designs which are currently being expanded into mixed-material type furniture and other designs.

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva is a Macedonian born artist living and working in Sussex exhibiting across Britain and internationally, often working with wood and other unusual materials. She is also an experienced gilder. Projects include the self-initiated COVID period The Gilded Elm project in Preston Park, Brighton; CUSP, a timber and steel sculpture, and many other wood related projects.

Rowland Keable – Britain’s leading rammed earth specialist and director of Rammed Earth Consulting. Rowland has been instrumental to bringing rammed earth construction to Britain, and will be talking about both earth and chalk construction, including projects in Sussex and Kent where chalk has been used as a core construction material.

Duncan Kramer is co-founder of two related businesses Front Yard Company and Green Roof Shelters that design and manufacture nature-based solutions to common utility needs (eg, cycle parking and bin storage.) Everything produced focusses on making more space for wildlife in urban spaces. This includes maintaining a coppiced chestnut woodland in East Sussex with the wood used on the Green Roof Shelters.