Folly
Book One
8. Margent Farm
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Lifted off the ground, its floor jutting out in a cantilever, with dark corrugated, studded walls and topped with a wide overhanging roof CASS Unit 7's prototype studio, is a balanced agricultural structure. The student group lead by David Grandorge and Paloma Gormley of Practice Architecture created the compact 30m2 space as an affordable, scalable and easy-to-built structure. It is marked by its innovative environmental materials, its rural vernacular but also its low budget and an evasion of planning permission.
The structure was designed as a scaleable, reproducible studio space for working or living, working in the perimeters of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act. With these restrictions on scale, permanency and foundations, the studio was innovative. It was constructed from minimal materials - a spruce and plywood structure with hemp cladding, which could simply slot together. The studio was therefore constructed in 12 days by the architects.
Situated on Margent Farm, outside Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the building took inspiration agricultural structures, with its studded, corrugated walls and subtly pitched roof. Although this was not the only inspiration from its rural farm setting - its use of hempcrete informed by the site. Margent Farm producers of organic and sustainable hemp crops, supplying the wellness industry, scientists and construction. The environmentally friendly Hemp captures carbon as its grows, converting it to biomass and releasing oxygen. Its use in the studio contributing to its carbon-negative classification. Announced last month, the structure was awarded for its sustainability by the Architect's Journal Small Project Prize.
I asked Paloma Gormley of Practice Architecture about the process and the ideas of the project and its outcome...
As a project for students what was the aim for the structure?
I was teaching a unit with David Grandorge at the CASS with a focus on lean materials. We wanted students to get come direct experience of construction and working in a hands on way with materials. There's something so empowering about realising something from start to finish - a process that in architecture generally takes many years. You can learn so many things from small projects that remain relevant to larger ones and it's an opportunity to be experimental and to test things out without too much risk.
The structure was built without planning permission, do you feel this was restrictive and/or liberating?
I think i've always worked under a belief that real life constraints generally makes things more interesting. It gives you something to push up against and play with. In this instance we took the regulations around the twin unit caravan and saw what you could do with them. Whilst there are very specific guidelines about the width and length of caravans the height is only limited internally to 3m. This meant we could do whatever we wanted with the external envelope, so we could if had wanted to have had a 5m high roof but opted to raise the entire structure on legs. This allowed the windows to peek over the hedge and the grass to run underneath it and made it feel somehow in dialogue with the sheep in neighbouring fields.
It has clear influences from agricultural structures - which existing structures provided inspiration and what is the role of this rural language in the building?
The building was inspired by the old grain stores built by agricultural small holders. These can be seen across Europe and were generally simple timber structures raised off the ground on saddle stones to protect the contents from damp and rats. They're very noble buildings with strong symmetry, steps up to a single entrance and a simple pitched roof with big eaves to protect against the rain. The same principals are at play in the studio. The design was one of four developed by the students through lots of physical modelling and was chosen as the one that we were all excited to realise at 1:1. David and I then worked with the students to resolve the details, manage the budget and orders and coordinate the build.
How did the project get involved with the Hemp Farm and Hempcrete?
I first met Steve from Margent Farm when he was looking some agricultural land on which to start growing hemp. He had a vision of setting up a rural R+D facility developing natural replacements for plastics, and whilst doing so to grow his own home. It was an incredibly exciting process, finding the land, sewing the first seeds, harvesting the crop and then working out how to process it into construction materials. We designed a simple 3 bedroom house that would also encompass the existing steel frame of a barn with a large hot house on the south side. The woody hurds of the hemp plant were mixed with lime to form hempcrete for the walls and the fibre was needle punched into a matt, impregnated with a sugar based resin and pressed into cladding sheets. The house was nearing completion when we arrived with the students and gave us a make-shift place to stay an array of cast off materials including the cladding. The students designs were framed by what materials were available to us on site and ensuring that everything else we needed would fit within a very small budget.
Do you think it is a viable structure for residential and commercial use? In regard to the project's small budget, not including the cost of land or labour.
The structure was designed to be polyvalent, in that it can be occupied in many different ways for different uses. The stepped section creates deep benches on the interior which invite invention for how you might use them - as sleeping decks, somewhere for laying out produce, a raised desk area, a nook for reading a book. All of which and more were explored by the students through drawing and modelling. The building is simple to construct and designed as a commercially viable zero carbon studio that can be built off site and delivered to your door.
We would like to thank and credit the project's tutors, Paloma Gormley and David Grandorge of Practice Architecture, but also all of CASS Unit 7, Josh Kaile, Arbana Berdynaj, Marcello Seminara, Oliver Carter, Tarn Philipp, Rebecca Johansson, Daisy Zhai, Charlie Tomlinson, Ross Ellmore, Laurence Hillier, Dahu Mumagi, Philomena Reinmuller and Alex Scally.
The structure was designed as a scaleable, reproducible studio space for working or living, working in the perimeters of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act. With these restrictions on scale, permanency and foundations, the studio was innovative. It was constructed from minimal materials - a spruce and plywood structure with hemp cladding, which could simply slot together. The studio was therefore constructed in 12 days by the architects.
Situated on Margent Farm, outside Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the building took inspiration agricultural structures, with its studded, corrugated walls and subtly pitched roof. Although this was not the only inspiration from its rural farm setting - its use of hempcrete informed by the site. Margent Farm producers of organic and sustainable hemp crops, supplying the wellness industry, scientists and construction. The environmentally friendly Hemp captures carbon as its grows, converting it to biomass and releasing oxygen. Its use in the studio contributing to its carbon-negative classification. Announced last month, the structure was awarded for its sustainability by the Architect's Journal Small Project Prize.
I asked Paloma Gormley of Practice Architecture about the process and the ideas of the project and its outcome...
As a project for students what was the aim for the structure?
I was teaching a unit with David Grandorge at the CASS with a focus on lean materials. We wanted students to get come direct experience of construction and working in a hands on way with materials. There's something so empowering about realising something from start to finish - a process that in architecture generally takes many years. You can learn so many things from small projects that remain relevant to larger ones and it's an opportunity to be experimental and to test things out without too much risk.
The structure was built without planning permission, do you feel this was restrictive and/or liberating?
I think i've always worked under a belief that real life constraints generally makes things more interesting. It gives you something to push up against and play with. In this instance we took the regulations around the twin unit caravan and saw what you could do with them. Whilst there are very specific guidelines about the width and length of caravans the height is only limited internally to 3m. This meant we could do whatever we wanted with the external envelope, so we could if had wanted to have had a 5m high roof but opted to raise the entire structure on legs. This allowed the windows to peek over the hedge and the grass to run underneath it and made it feel somehow in dialogue with the sheep in neighbouring fields.
It has clear influences from agricultural structures - which existing structures provided inspiration and what is the role of this rural language in the building?
The building was inspired by the old grain stores built by agricultural small holders. These can be seen across Europe and were generally simple timber structures raised off the ground on saddle stones to protect the contents from damp and rats. They're very noble buildings with strong symmetry, steps up to a single entrance and a simple pitched roof with big eaves to protect against the rain. The same principals are at play in the studio. The design was one of four developed by the students through lots of physical modelling and was chosen as the one that we were all excited to realise at 1:1. David and I then worked with the students to resolve the details, manage the budget and orders and coordinate the build.
How did the project get involved with the Hemp Farm and Hempcrete?
I first met Steve from Margent Farm when he was looking some agricultural land on which to start growing hemp. He had a vision of setting up a rural R+D facility developing natural replacements for plastics, and whilst doing so to grow his own home. It was an incredibly exciting process, finding the land, sewing the first seeds, harvesting the crop and then working out how to process it into construction materials. We designed a simple 3 bedroom house that would also encompass the existing steel frame of a barn with a large hot house on the south side. The woody hurds of the hemp plant were mixed with lime to form hempcrete for the walls and the fibre was needle punched into a matt, impregnated with a sugar based resin and pressed into cladding sheets. The house was nearing completion when we arrived with the students and gave us a make-shift place to stay an array of cast off materials including the cladding. The students designs were framed by what materials were available to us on site and ensuring that everything else we needed would fit within a very small budget.
Do you think it is a viable structure for residential and commercial use? In regard to the project's small budget, not including the cost of land or labour.
The structure was designed to be polyvalent, in that it can be occupied in many different ways for different uses. The stepped section creates deep benches on the interior which invite invention for how you might use them - as sleeping decks, somewhere for laying out produce, a raised desk area, a nook for reading a book. All of which and more were explored by the students through drawing and modelling. The building is simple to construct and designed as a commercially viable zero carbon studio that can be built off site and delivered to your door.
We would like to thank and credit the project's tutors, Paloma Gormley and David Grandorge of Practice Architecture, but also all of CASS Unit 7, Josh Kaile, Arbana Berdynaj, Marcello Seminara, Oliver Carter, Tarn Philipp, Rebecca Johansson, Daisy Zhai, Charlie Tomlinson, Ross Ellmore, Laurence Hillier, Dahu Mumagi, Philomena Reinmuller and Alex Scally.