Material Cultures
Material Cultures

Home Schooling, 2025

▣ TYPE: Research / Demonstrator
▨ CLIENT: William Sutton Prize / Clarion Housing
▤ KEY MATERIALS: Timber / Straw / Reed / Clay

▦ METHODOLOGY: Educational Framework / Development Model

▥ COLLABORATORS: Clarion Housing 

Home Schooling is a development model for bioregional housing demonstrators which uses construction sites as a building schools, galvanising biobased material supply chains, improving housing accessibility and fostering biodiversity gains while addressing the skills for transition gap. Home Schooling was shortlisted for The William Sutton Prize for Sustainability 2025.

Material Cultures

Centring locally sourced, low-embodied carbon materials in the construction of small-scale housing projects, Home Schooling will provide a much-needed classroom for the education of the next generation of builders. The government intends to address the housing crisis by building 1.5 million new homes in over the next 4 years.  Without any attempt to shift away from business-as-usual materials and construction processes, this will only exacerbate already staggering levels of biodiversity loss, with 70% of all biodiversity lost over the past fifty years, and the construction industry accounting for one third of this loss.

Home Schooling works by leveraging development profits to support an educational model. This proposal uses the design and construction of a small housing developments to demonstrate the potential of bioregional material supply chains and seed biobased building skills within a new construction workforce. By connecting housing developments to sites of cultivation growing key material crops, our training and development model creates bridges between generally siloed groups working to address the climate crisis – farmers, designers, community groups, builders, and planners.

Home Schooling, 2025

▣ TYPE: Research / Demonstrator
▨ CLIENT: William Sutton Prize / Clarion Housing
▤ KEY MATERIALS: Timber / Straw / Reed / Clay

▦ METHODOLOGY: Educational Framework / Development Model

▥ COLLABORATORS: Clarion Housing 

Material Cultures

Home Schooling works by leveraging development profits to support an educational model. This proposal uses the design and construction of a small housing developments to demonstrate the potential of bioregional material supply chains and seed biobased building skills within a new construction workforce. By connecting housing developments to sites of cultivation growing key material crops, our training and development model creates bridges between generally siloed groups working to address the climate crisis – farmers, designers, community groups, builders, and planners.