Digory Macfarlane

Sawing Wood & Sipping Tea

Can building and working with timber induce a more spiritual way of life and thereby reinvent the architecture of the Heygate Estate as the calm haven that its original designers intended it to be?

Counter to its impending replacement by mass luxury housing we are proposing the Institue of Progressive Carpenters, where man and machine will work together, immersed in a natural and tranquil oasis amidst the bustle of South East London.

Utilising the underlying concepts found within the Japanese tea ceremony, together with a marriage of traditional carpentry techniques and modern timber technologies, the unique training facility encourages and explores new ways of working with fabrication robotics. It will promote experimentation in programming in ways that are currently restricted and under explored within the manufacturing industry, expanding the creative potentialities of robotics in the fields of carpentry, architecture and industrial design. Effectively, the Institute of Progressive Carpenters will be training the machine to work in sympathy with wood, as man has done for thousands of years.