This project begins with the proposition that architecture is not the production of objects, but the organisation of relationships between labour, material, and ritual. It questions the present-day separation of making from everyday life, seeking instead to recover forms of collective practice in which work and celebration exist as a continuous cycle.

Central to this enquiry is the hythe. Derived from the Old English hyð, meaning a landing place or harbour, the hythe was a place of arrival, exchange, and gathering, where materials, goods, and people were brought together before being redistributed. It was a civic space shaped by trade, craft, and communal life. The project reimagines the hythe as an architecture of making and exchange.

Its material ethos is informed by the tradition of rural bodging, in which craftspeople worked directly with what the landscape provided. Rather than forcing materials into predetermined forms, they allowed their inherent qualities to guide the act of making. In doing so, a vernacular emerged naturally from the resources, techniques, and limitations of a particular place. Skill lay not in overcoming the material, but in understanding it.