Unit 8 has been immersing itself in the market town of Stroud, in the Cotswolds, for the past eight months. We began with a site visit, exploring its local arts, culture, businesses, and landscape through visits to Stroud Valley Arts, Folly Woods, its brewery, and more. To find our own way of celebrating Stroud, we each made a short film capturing our experience and the various ‘communities’ that bring the place to life.

In semester one we each created a ‘communal gift’ for the town. These timber framed structures, on small sites across Stroud, created mini hubs for local groups - from canalboat free-cycling to a co-operative ‘publet’. To ground these buildings we each made timber construction joints at 1:1 & 1:2, pushing us to think tectonically and expand our spatial concepts, starting to turn us into designer makers.

From here we each selected two contrasting clients and created stories that brought their lives together in a single building - a kind of social condenser thriving off their differences and similarities. Our iterative design process included workshops on storytelling, 1:50 tectonic model making and rapid massing model prototyping. The unit encouraged diversity with a brief that covered everything from the first International Court of Ecocide to a co-working space for dog owners, from a regional hub for Asian cuisine to retrofitting the old library into a community hub.

We left this unit having tuned our design sensibilities to the very particular scale of the town embedded in a very connected world, with projects looking to form a generosity pact with Stroud, something that we hope you will enjoy in our work.