This lecture explores a vision of architecture where making—and remaking—is central to the act of design. In response to global environmental challenges, timber emerges as a vital material for the future. At Hooke Park, projects are shaped by curiosity, craft, and creativity, blending traditional material knowledge with advanced technologies such as 3D scanning, robotic fabrication, and CNC production. This fusion creates a dynamic balance between the computational and the physical, fostering innovation. Hooke Park is presented as a forest laboratory—a space of intense investigation and a home for architectural adventurers.

About Emmanuel Vercruysse:
Emmanuel is Co-Director of Design + Make. He is a designer, with a deep interest in the relationship between drawing and making. He holds a BSc, Diploma and Masters degree from the Bartlett school of Architecture, having previously studied furniture design in Belgium, and approaches design as a series of translations between drawings and objects that oscillate between intuitive acts and precise operations.

This approach to design combined with his in-depth knowledge of digital fabrication techniques means that he views the digital very much as an augmentation of the poetic capacity of the analogue and he continues to explore the production of architecture intuitively through iterations of drawing, prototyping, craft and code.

Emmanuel is involved in numerous collaborative practices and research groups, including art and architecture practice LiquidFactory; Field Robotics group RAVEN and the RIBA award winning experimental architectural practice Sixteen*(makers).
He has held a set of leading roles at the Architectural Association and the Bartlett School of Architecture. As well as being Co-Director of the AA Postgraduate Design + Make course - positioning the campus at the forefront of Architectural Research through prototyping and large scale fabrication – he was Programme Director of the Design for Manufacturing course at the Bartlett’s Here East campus.

Emmanuel was a member of the Teaching and Learning Committee at the AA where his focus was on fostering innovative and experimental teaching methodologies and attitudes. Teaching is a critical part of Emmanuel’s practice, with an emphasis on the interrogation of the processes involved in design thinking, investigating the particular interrelationships between the made and the drawn.

Time:
Wednesday, 19 November 2025, 6.30 p.m.
 
Location:
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Hybrides Lernatelier
Amalienstrasse 13, room 003
99423 Weimar

Online via BBB:
https://meeting.uni-weimar.de/b/tho-xoi-toq-x1l

irreguLAB Talks are hosted by the professorship for Emerging Technologies and Design in collaboration with Professur Konstruktives Entwerfen und Tragwerkslehre (A+U) and Professur Konstruktives Entwerfen und Erproben (A+U)