The Woodshed Pavilion is an installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for the 1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces Exhibition. We proposed to use forest thinnings from the parks of London to construct a Woodshed. Thinning is a contemporary forest management practice whereby small, constricted trees are removed or “thinned” from amongst larger, more “economically viable” trees. Even though forest thinnings are a plentiful and renewable resource, they have been underutilized due to their inability to meet industrial economies of scale and fabrication.

Like the traditional shed, this structure is utilitarian, direct, and forthright while at the same time elevating the status of the material to its rightful place of quiet nobility to which it once aspired while in the forest. The Woodshed is not about craft. It is not about joinery. Utilizing a single material, singular tools of construction, a single joint, and a single connection, it is instead about the powerful accretion of ubiquitous, inexpensive materials. It is about the smell, rigor and constrained delight inherent in the singularity of wood. At a market cost of roughly £2 per metric tonne, it is about the abundance of the material. Indeed it is this very abundance that ironically contributes to its seeming economic insignificance. This was designed in collaboration with Danny Wicke, Andrew Freear, and Rusty Smith within the Rural Studio.