Assembly Workshop

Hooke Park, Dorset

The ‘Big Shed’ is a 500sqm Assembly Workshop that provides a new sheltered workspace at Hooke Park (the AA’s woodland estate in Dorset) for full-scale prototyping, testing, and pre-assembly. It was designed by AA students of the Design & Make Diploma Unit 19, whose concept proposals were combined into a scheme for a faceted timber skin manipulated according to site, environmental and functional influences. The building is oriented to provide a campus entrance sequence and to open onto a large central work yard, in which saw-milling and fabrication activities are carried out. The building structure, engineered with consultants Atelier One, has pioneered the use of high-capacity screwed connections within large round-wood trusses. Developed through an experimental testing in collaboration with Bath University, this approach allows trees to be used ‘in-the-round’ in complex structures without the need for major engineering processing. The project was developed through full-scale testing and prototyping by the students