We live in the era of the instant; a flattened and frenetic globalised time in which the ticking clock is ‘the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine’.

Sited on the post-industrial waterfront of Gravesend, the The School of Earthworks and Ecology celebrates slowness, and looks instead to wider timescales: seasonal and tidal rhythms, and the gradual accretion of the salt marsh.

Following Heidegger’s notions that functional building has become dislocated from the act of dwelling, the project considers these acts as reciprocal, and asks what it means to follow a ritualised method of construction that is in itself to ‘dwell’. In a material and temporal dialogue with its landscape, this process aims to cultivate community, nurture heritage through regenerative mending, and undertake ecological stewardship with remedial planting strategies.

Oscillating between positive and negative, the building reflects the ebb and flow of tides and time in its shifting slip cast spaces; the formation of the slip echoes the soft deposition of river sediment. By following the cyclical nature of the cast, the project asks how we can understand our dwellings as processes rather than products.