Rural Works - Boundaries

Rural Works is an educational workshop that has been held annually in the village of Staveley in the Lake District. The workshop sees a group of architecture students from the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff embarking on a field trip to the local area. The group respond to the setting with sketches, hand drawings, and the making of temporary installations that students design and install themselves.

With permission from the owners, in 2018 we worked on the edge of Staveley Park, in the privately owned but publicly accessible patch of woodland that sits along the footpath leading away from the village. Students worked in small groups to create temporary installations that sought to draw attention to an existing element of the site, to in some way enhance the existing setting and add a moment of interest. We worked with a limited palette of low-cost, readily available and simple materials. Working with simple materials is important to the ethos of Rural Works. We test out creative interventions at minimal expense – and put the emphasis on creativity, encouraging students to think about what enjoyable, interesting proposals can be created within finite limitations. 

All of the interventions are humble in scale and light-touch. Students worked, over the course of just four days, to design and install a temporary installation. All the installations were set up without any permanent fixings so as to leave no trace on the land after we departed. The installations were then transported and rearranged in the studio spaces of the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff in an exhibition of work, to show other students and academics what had been created. The 2018 workshop was led by Zoë Berman with co-tutor Shamoon Patwari.