From us all at Studio Bark, we wish you all a happy new year.
This year we have donated to Care 4 Calais, a volunteer-run refugee charity working with refugees in the UK, France and Belgium. If you would like to support them too, please click here.
Here’s how we shaped our 2022…
We were off to an exciting start to 2022, dedicating time to reaffirm our values as a practice and as creators within the built environment.
Taking the time to strengthen our ambitions, we committed ourselves to all our new build projects being built to achieve whole life zero carbon by 2025. (Mostly this entailed a lot of maths and spreadsheets – not just pretty pictures!)
This year we embraced three fantastic new members into our team.
Misbah has been a Vectorworks beacon, guiding us into new and exciting ways of modelling whilst enjoying some early stage project work.
Ella hit the ground running with her enthusiasm for getting stuck into large scale projects and curating a thoroughly researched student construction week.
Aurora, a familiar face from our NBAU 2021 student build project, has dived straight into working on research and design for a retrofit project in the Stroud Valley.
We have been trialing a new working structure which includes half a day of studio related upskilling and half a day of personal upskilling each fortnight.
This was kicked off with a series of Carbon counting and life cycle assessments sessions led by Tom with the support of our environmental consultancy friends at Looper.
We also embarked on a series of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion workshops to get us better equipped to create an inclusive working environment, covering areas we sometimes take for granted.
The personal upskilling time is half a day each fortnight to invest in our individual aspirations and hobbies, with swimming, boat building, sewing and pottery to name a few.
As always, we like to get hands on at Studio Bark and our ‘out of office’ activities this year have been no exception.
We attended a fantastic open day at HG Matthews brickwork yard, learning about low embodied carbon brick construction techniques. We were lucky enough to visit The Village Nursery, showcasing all types of bricks and strocks from the workshop.
We also embarked on a collaboration with UEL’s MArch students to research and test the capabilities of rammed stone. Through their hard work, we have better understood how rammed earth can be used most effectively in the UK climate.
This research has been instrumental in the design development of a live project within the studio.
On Friday 16th December we put on an event titled Future Voices and Pioneering Projects at the RIBA. The event was to premiere a short film about No Building As Usual 2021, produced by architectural photographer and filmmaker, Jim Stephenson and his team. It was made even more special by the presence of The People’s Pavilion and Accelerate, whose young participants gave short presentations about the respective programmes.
It was a wonderful celebration, and hugely special to be able to share it with so many familiar faces, especially the NBAU 2021 student cohort! A huge thanks to all those who attended and presented, and especially to Teshome Douglas-Campbell, alumnus of the New Architecture Writers (NAW) for his excellent chairing. For those who couldn’t make it, don’t worry, the film will be available to watch on our NBAU page early next year.
We are delighted to announce our ongoing collaboration with visual and climate artist Michael Pinsky on Making A Stand. The public artwork is coming to Leeds’ City Square in Spring 2023, as part of the Leeds 2023 culture festival. Watch this space!
There will be many more projects to look forward to in the new year, big and small. As a practice, we will be looking to shift our expertise to include more retrofit and community build projects.
We look forward to hearing from you in 2023!
