Dark Room

A fully enclosed Dark Room developed by D+M students as part of their Term 1 introductory studios. Carefully nested on an edge condition between the territory of the workshop and the enveloping fabric of the forest, this small building is a meditation on the act of image making – housing a wondrous alchemy of mechanical and chemical processes in its dark belly. Through an ongoing collaboration between Design + Make, Media Studies, and the AA Photo Studio - the project is now in an advanced state - and will soon enable AA students to again explore the processes of analogue photography. One such experiment has been to utilise the structure’s front room as a camera obscura.

Students began their work from an inherited primary structure - a full scale laminated timber model of Le Corbusier’s Dom-Ino House (1914-15) developed for the 2014 Venice Bienalle by AA’s Valentin Bontjes van Beek. With a condensed time frame, a design strategy was initiated whereby a large oversailing roof plane would first be constructed to offer protected work on site, while the careful design of an insert was fully resolved. The project enabled the testing of design methodologies and fabrication techniques that are being further developed in the same students ongoing development of Wakeford Hall.