Design Educates Awards 2022

Code-Bothy is an experimental digitally-designed brick shelter and the first project borne from an ongoing research partnership between Material Architecture Lab (MAL) at The Bartlett, UCL and London-based architecture studio, Piercy&Company. Called ‘Making and Practice’, the partnership brings together expertise in digital fabrication techniques and material experimentation. It aims to find new applications in craft, design and architecture and provide proof of concept to industry by realising research subjects as full-size structures. The partnership provides two-month placements to two recent graduate students from The Bartlett, divided between MAL and Piercy&Company. Whereas rudimentary geometries form a traditional bothy (a basic shelter in remote areas), Code-Bothy uses parametric modelling to generate a curved form with a complex offset brick structure. Built on-site at Grymsdyke Farm in Buckinghamshire, the bricklayer wore an AR (augmented reality) headset displaying information from the 3D model. The bricklayer, often working against intuition, successfully constructed the intentionally complex form. The digital/manual connection lies at the heart of the research’s relevance: the use of the AR headset on-site enabled the practical realisation of the complex parametric and digital design, a design that had been structurally tested in the model but seemed implausible to the bricklayer. Advances are being made across academia and practice using parametric modelling to reduce wasted materials, minimise material over-use, and push structures to be as efficient and lean as possible. Code-Bothy demonstrates how these advances can be relatively simply applied in a real construction environment using the existing skills of the construction labour force. Code-Bothy was motivated by the search for a new language for sustainable brick architecture - driven by beauty, formal playfulness and textural delight. The gradually rotating angles of the brickwork for Code-Bothy create a complex and beautiful pattern, prompting an aesthetic reassessment of the humble brick. There is joy and delight to be found in sustainable architecture. Code-Bothy proposes an (optimistic) vision: one where the bricklayer’s skills, fine judgement, and timing are enhanced by the digital tools of parametrics and AR. It is the combination of the digital and manual that the structural possibilities, material use reduction and visual language of brick architecture are expanded.