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Invisible Studio
Clips 2

About


Invisible Studio is an innovative and award winning architecture practice founded by Piers Taylor. Taylor is a Chartered Architect, was the inaugural Studio Master at the Architectural Association for the Design & Make Programme at Hooke Park, a former Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge, a founding director at Mitchell Taylor Workshop, an anniversary scholarship PhD Candidate at the University of Reading, an external examiner at the Arts University, Bournemouth and the Convenor of Studio in the Woods. Invisible Studio is led by Piers Taylor with architect Kate Darby, who currently teaches at the Welsh School of Architecture and the Architectural Association.

Invisible Studio aims to be a different organisation from a conventional practice. It operates through collaboration, experimentation, research and education, working internationally and very locally, in a variety of fields and at a variety of scales, from a self built studio located in a working woodland which we also manage as an ongoing forest enterprise alongside practice. Invible Studio have pioneered a number of academic programmes that rethink the relationship between design and making, "We are not interested in making as a mechanism for simply providing us with some new form-making techniques which are inflected by their material realisation, but instead, in terms of how material practice can address social and political questions", they claim.

With each project, Invisible Studio aims to realise something extraordinary. Its practice is interested in going about the process of architecture in a different way – a way where clients, users, collaborators and makers are all part of the process of design, and sometimes construction. Invisible Studio is interested in making unusual, delightful and intelligent buildings and environments that are thorough, considered and exceptional, and have a wider consequence outside their own material actuality.

Their work encompasses a number of seminal buildings from ecologically sensitive self builds through to schools, community and public buildings and large scale urban environments, and has been published widely and internationally and has won a plethora of awards including a number of RIBA National, Regional and Sustainability Awards, Wood Awards, WAN Awards, the AJ Small Projects Award and has been shortlisted for the Stephen Lawrence Prize.

With its work, Invisible Studio aims to push boundaries from material research through to wider environmental concerns. It aims to tackle issues of climate change from first principles, where big issues are addressed head on. In terms of technology, Invisible Studio prefers to use passive principles to aid building performance, and use these principles to define the premise of a building. They are unusual in that we are ‘hands-on’ and often construct their own projects within the wider team that is Invisible Studio.

"Our approach often takes the materials, available resources and skills from any given context and uses them to make buildings from," says Piers Taylor. "In recent years, design – to a certain degree – has become synonymous with a grotesque kind of applied luxury. We have no interest in that world of design, and our work offers in some ways an alternative, lower impact model of architecture, where design is not a luxury add on, but a process by which the most is extracted from the least through intelligent and clever thinking. We have a particular expertise with timber, and have close relationships with the UK’s leading timber engineers and fabricators including Charley Brentnall who is a close collaborator of ours, and we also organise the annual Studio in the Woods which is a place where makers, architects and students collaborate on projects, paying reverence to the overlooked and the nearby".

"We aim to set the standard for a new type of progressive architectural practice – a practice bound together by a shared experimental ethos, a creative organisation agile enough to reinvent itself as necessary, and a practice fearless in challenging preconceptions and making a difference."

Invisible Studio's website.

Clips by Invisible Studio

Strips including clips by Invisible Studio

Practice Ep. 1: Invisible Studio
21:00 min

Practice Ep. 1: Invisible Studio

Published on Mar 25, 2020
Studio in the Woods
14:47 min

Studio in the Woods

Published on Jul 10, 2019