STUDENT LODGE 3 / CARLOS CHEN, STEPHANIE CRAMER, SARINA DA COSTA GOMEZ, IOSIF DAKORONIAS-MARINA, ELISABETH LAWRENCE

Student Lodge 3 (SL3) is part of Architectural Association’s Hooke Park campus in rural Dorset.

 

Hooke Park is the experimental woodland of the Architectural Association where architects and architecture students are given the opportunity to test and build innovative ideas and buildings.

 

The building is a two bedroom student accommodation designed by a group of five international architects. The members of the team met through the AA’s Design & Make masters programme and were given the task to deliver a fully functional, code compliant building that would contribute to the development of Hooke Park. The lodge would have to  house two full-time students of the Design & Make programme, providing all the necessary spaces and at the same time keeping a tight and low budget, reacting to local resources such as the managed forest and the local manufacturers.

 

The overall design, supervision and construction was conducted by the five members of the team through a hands-on approach, switching numerous times between the drawing board and the construction site. This approach to building, prominent in the Design & Make philosophy, gave the architects the opportunity to test how their design affects construction and vice-versa.

The design process was the consequence of two main processes:

 

The full scale prototypes gave the opportunity to the team to inhabit the design intentions and to understand the outcome and consequences of drawings. Design aspects such as scale, orientation, distribution and proportion derived from the prototypes experimentation process on and off-site.

 

The team gathered a vast amount of materials locally and was engaged in developing ties with the local community. Aluminium, galvanised steel, double and triple glazing, slates, floorboards and miscellaneous unique items were inventoried and catalogued. This allowed for a careful assessment of the usage possibilities of these items in order to design wall cladding systems, windows, structural members and customised furniture pieces.

 

SL3 got Honors in the under 40 category at the Architecture Prizes presented by the Union of Greek Architects.

SL3 got an Honorable Mention at the International Architecture Awards 2015.

SL3 will be on display at the 8th Biennale of Young Architects, organized by the Hellenic Institute of Architecture.