THE GUILD Part 1 Project 2003 David De La MareSam Rose Kingston University Kingston | UK Guild was a year long programme, developing themes which sought to address issues within the contemporary construction industry. Focussing on the increasing use of timber and the training of skilled labour, the project was manifested in two buildings in Kings Cross. The first, within a partly demolished landscape of Victorian industrial infrastructure, investigated ideas of lamination, providing workshop, teaching and residential facilities for students undertaking joinery apprenticeships. The headquarters building developed these themes further, through a 1:1 exploration of timber and construction methods, examining how the resultant material and spatial qualities could offer scales of interface with the public realm. This work is powerful in its continuity of thought and intention. Beauty emerges through the consistency of investigation at all scales; spatial, tectonic and material qualities become engendered through a continuous and tactile relationship and a complex meshing with place and programme. Key themes of the studio, the relationship between thinking and making and the situating of technology in terms of topography or place are implicit in the work. They were developed by defining an attitude to a material, timber in its many forms, through both thought and action. The resultant projects are both encompassing and precise, modest yet highly sophisticated. Tutor(s)