What is the value of research to architectural practice?
Harvest Moon is part of an ongoing research project developed as part of Charles’s role as a Professor of Architecture at UCA Canterbury School of Art, Architecture and Design. Funded by an internal research grant, it explores the use of biomaterials and agricultural waste in new forms of design and construction. Responding directly to the climate crisis and the specific challenges facing architecture and design as major contributors to climate change, the project proposes the use of non-extractive and circular materials.
Harvest Moon is a table made from materials collected within a forty-mile radius of Canterbury. Chalk, dug-up apple trees, chestnut timber, bark peelings, baling twine and pallet straps have been brought together to form a piece of furniture that is both practical and ceremonial. Designed in collaboration with fellow UCA professor Cat Rossi and circular-material experts Local Works Studio, it uses agricultural waste materials while also expressing their potential.
Everything used in its making – including the tools – comes from the same local landscape. The table top is cast chalk mixed with wood chippings, bark and brightly coloured agricultural waste, creating a kind of terrazzo that makes the process of gathering visible. The legs are formed from apple-tree branches; pegs and framing from chestnut. The construction remains open and ad-hoc, expressing the materials’ origins rather than disguising them.
Apple wood is a rare treat.
Even when mature,
the highest branches
scarcely reach beyond
the ridge line of a two-storey
house and the trunk is
nearly always short and crooked.localworksstudiogrounder.substack.com
Local Works Studio
The table is intended to be collectively assembled and disassembled, like a contemporary barn raising. Each time it is put together it becomes the centre of a Harvest Gathering: a social as much as technical event in which people assemble the pieces in sequence, guided by colour-coded bindings. The act is accompanied by a musical score written by Folkestone-based artist Anna Braithwaite, which evolves with each performance.
So far the table has been ‘raised’ three times, each occasion unique though connected. At UCA’s Herbert Read Gallery a group of academics, designers, artists and students came together while Anna performed her score with a mix of digital and analogue instruments. A month later it was assembled again in Dover’s Urban Room, where local musician Paul Cheneour interpreted the music on jazz flute. Most recently it has been installed in the James Hockey Gallery as part of Farnham Craft Month.
Harvest Moon forms part of a wider investigation into seasonality, place-based materials and the renewal of communal practices in architecture and design. It asks how we might reconnect with growing, gathering and the land, and what new design languages and social rituals might emerge from that reconnection. The table continues to travel, carrying with it both the materials of east Kent and an invitation to gather around them.
Through the project the practice has developed its knowledge of circular material processes, fostered new collaborative relationships and deepened its understanding of fabrication and the role of craft. It demonstrates how research can generate new knowledge that continues to inform the practice’s work and approach.