Kielder Probes' - bespoke tools for an indeterminate design process (2005)
article⁄Kielder Probes' - bespoke tools for an indeterminate design process (2005)
abstract⁄Sixteen makers are a group of practicing architects, academics, designers and makers who assemble when key questions surrounding design, fabrication, use and adaptability in architecture emerge. Initially, the group was formed out of a motivation to engage as designers with the physical and tactile aspects of production without a dependency upon drawing. Now, in the post digital age, the age of digital fabrication, boundaries between drawing and making, between the designer and the maker, have dissolved. Consequently sixteenmakers work is now engaged with questions of knowledge transfer, expertise, and innovation where modes of investigation are equally embedded within in the analogue and the digital world. This article relates to our latest ongoing work which is due for completion in 200506. The work has been developed as a specific response to the award of an architectural residency by the Art and Architecture Partnership at Kielder Park, Northumbria, England. From the outset, it has not been a requirement of the residency that an outcome is identified early on. In fact, as I write, the outcome remains open. Presented with an extraordinary site and coinciding with a time of rapid change the work has begun by exploring a design process that is adaptable, indeterminate, and informed by site conditions. In October 2003, sixteenmakers were awarded an architecture residency by The Art and Architecture Programme at Kielder AAPK of Northumbria, UK. This organization is well known for commissioning works such as the ‘Belvedere’ by Softroom and the ‘Skyspace’ by James Turrell. Coordinated by Peter Sharp, AAPK consists of a number of large public bodies, including The Forestry Commission, Northumbrian Water and Tyndale District Council. Together they manage a land area of 62,000 ha’s centred on the UK’s largest reservoir and surrounded on all sides by one of Europe’s largest managed forests.
