August 2016

Over the summer, Will and I put together a small workshop using mostly unwanted, discarded and seemingly worthless materials. The majority of the materials had previously had a life serving another purpose and were destined for landfill or to be burned, and some of the materials destined for that end were in perfectly good conditions but just excess constructions materials. It is crazy the amount of waste that is generated in construction through errors in ordering and practice. Generally in the construction field, there is no awareness of how much waste is being created and it is normal in the culture to just throw things in a skip and not worry about where it ends up. Often no thought is given to the toxicity of these materials and their lifespan.

We wanted to build a temporary workshop space and as an experiment, we set out to do it with as many found materials as possible. Luckily a pad foundation existed already so only a minimal amount of cement was required to fix the timber columns in the ground. Thanks to some skip diving, having some contacts in the construction industry and some good fortune, the only things we need to purchase were consumables like sandpaper, screws and a flue for the wood burner that Will found by sheer luck in a bush when he was relieving himself.

The design evolved in a fairly evolutionary way as we better understood the materials we were working with. This was our first project and we had minimal skills between us, but it was great fun experimenting and learning along the way. The workshop with its hand-me-down parts and features fits surprisingly well into its context, and surrounding buildings. Many lessons were learned in the making of this workshop including the importance of keeping things square! (if thats you’re going for)