The Forest Ark is our most distinctive building at Hazel Hill Wood. It was designed in 2008 to showcase high-tech, off-grid living. Within its curving, organic form, rainwater was converted into drinking water, a wood-burning stove cooks, heats water for washing and heating; there is a cob wall that transmits heat from the south-facing wall.
The problem is, fifteen years later, many of these technologies are no longer working – or indeed never worked. It turns out that operating all these technologies together is complicated. Getting these systems to work in sync takes regular testing and tweaking of routines, which is fine if you live there every day, but is not suited to a building that is for more occasional educational use.
So is this a failure? The only failure I would say is if we fail to see this building as an experiment. The failure would be if we gave up and stopped learning.
The challenges of keeping the building working have caused the Forest Ark to fall into some disrepair with a potentially hefty bill for restoring it to its full glory. The easiest path would be to abandon the building. This is more typically the approach of modern construction. A blank slate is so much easier to work with, so much easier to profit from, than the complexities of existing structures.
A regenerative approach is to see our work on the Forest Ark as an act of care, to unlock the potential of what we have, and to see the potential of the work itself to create thriving, not just in the ends of improving the building.
For that care to start, we need to get to know each other. Our first date is the rainwater harvesting system. We just don’t think we can justify the expense and complication of running a rainwater harvesting and high-tech purification system on such a small scale. But connecting to the mains is itself an experiment that involves digging around the site to rediscover the buried rainwater harvesting system and the wastewater pipes.
And in that digging work, I already notice my connection to and affection for this building growing. I appreciate the craftsmanship that went into the original construction and want to honour that in our maintenance. I also encounter, for the first time, the clay that is so abundant on our site. Could clay become a locally abundant material that we work with?
Buildings are not static objects but living experiments that can evolve over time. Through the process of continuous, place-based design, we create and then we observe and see what needs to change. That ongoing dialogue connects us to place, connects us to the specific emergent needs of the local built environment and the local community.
My hope is that through our work with the Forest Ark, we weave more people into the journey, developing our skills as we go to work with local materials, building our capacity to adapt and evolve with the place around us.
Hazel Hill Build Weeks
If you are interested in getting involved with caring for our off-grid eco-buildings at Hazel Hill, then you might be interested joining one of our two Build Weeks in July from 14th to 27th July 2025. I’ll share on this blog details when they go live.