Pioneering the Potential 2025

Known across Europe as the Godfather of European rammed earth culture, Martin Rauch has been a critical influence on the growth of earth construction and architecture in central Europe and beyond. Rauch’s recent focus has been on developing rammed earth@scale, and is about to open his company’s LehmTonErde, new Erden workshop, and research and education centre, while his latest Hortus office building collaboration with Swiss Starchitects Herzog & de Meuron features the first ever hybrid earth-timber-ceiling slabs, originally developed by Rauch and LehmTonErde.

This will be a rare opportunity to hear Martin Rauch speak in Britain.

FURTHER

Gone to Earth – Martin Rauch’s Swiss Earth Works – Unstructured extra 7 themed edition.

The man who builds with earth – Martin Rauch in-depth profile – Unstructured extra 7 feature.

Fire Walls (and Fire Floors) Karak – the Rauch family’s raku tile offshoot, founded by Martha and Sebastian Rauch – in Fourth Door Review 12.

Ilanz’s magical, medieval electric cinema: Cinema sil Plaz by CapualBlumenthal Architekten – a Rauch/LehmTonErde project with the local community Cinema sil Plaz, iIlanz, Graubunden, Switzerland – Unstructured extra 7 feature.

In 2017 Roman Capual spoke at Make Lewes Festival’s New Vernaculars for a New Century micro-symposium.

Heavy Weight – Herzog & de Meuron’s Ricola Herb Centre with @scale LehmTonErde walls – Unstructured extra 7 feature.

^{Sil de Plaz Cinema, Ilanz – photo Laura Egger}

Alison Crowther is a sculptor and wood carver working with native species – primarily oak – from her workshop studio near Petersfield. She has been fashioning windblown wood for over thirty years, after completing a product design masters at London’s Royal College of Art, primarily through wood carving techniques. Her sculpture spans different scales, though are often large, such as for her Scale Tree, Xylosphere and Park Land commissions. The latter, a reception desk highlighting the tree trunks medullary rays reflects Crowther’s emphasis on exploring wood’s natural features and forms in her sculptural practice. Smaller pieces include garden furniture and seating at Glyndebourne Opera House and Mount Cayburn.

Walter Bailey – as Crowther is wood carver to West Sussex, so Bailey is to East Sussex. Born in Sunderland, Bailey has lived and worked in various parts of the county for over thirty years, developing a distinctive sculptural aesthetic working with local oak, beech and other woods. Expressive latticed patterns, whether in platonic solids or woven and natural form, have become a byword of Bailey’s work, made possible through a skilled use of a chainsaw machine. Works include Oak Stones, Xylem, House of Invisible Museum, (at the National Trust’s Leith Hill, Surrey), Four Cardinal Points, and A Flame for Dunblane, while the development of Bailey’s latticed motifs led to their high-profile use on the external façade of Oxford Street’s Park House.

FURTHER

Walter Bailey: Natural forms, Human Endeavour by Kay Syrad, Unstructured extra 5 feature

Performing the elemental – Walter Bailey and Charley Morrisey’s Absolute Zero – Unstructured extra 5 feature

An in-depth interview feature with Alison Crowther is in the works and we hope that this is live by the time of the evening.

^{Walter Bailey’s Fire+Seed at Wakehurst Place – photo Walter Bailey Sculpture}

^{Swedish deforestation – photo Marcus Westberg}

More of Everything – is a documentary film which lifts the lid on the Swedish Forestry Model, an approach that has been described as trying to get ‘more of everything’, and its impact on the country’s forest’s health and biodiversity. With up to 90% of the country’s forests turned over to ‘production’ forestry which often means plantation monocultures, only small fragments of old growth forests remain. This industrial approach is increasingly being questioned, and polarising opinion across the forested northern Nordic world. Groups spanning forest ecologists and scientists, Sami indigenous communities, campaigning organisations like Greenpeace Nordic and Swedish activists Protect the Forest (Skydda Skogen) contend that, far from a forward-looking example of the green bioeconomy, the forestry sector is doubling down on destructive ’business as usual’, while portraying itself as a model 21st century green industry. More of Everything, made by Skydda Skogen member Viktor Säfve, highlights these critiques.

With a post-film discussion with Säfve.