‘…this wildness of thought, and roughness of work; this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp…’

– John Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’

The relationship between humankind and Earth has long been defined as anthropocentric: we exchange immediate desires for long-term consequences which remain abstract in our minds, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. Yet, our dependence on science and technology to resolve various environmental crises has paradoxically created more distance between ourselves and the planet. At the same time, there has been a recent resurgence in spiritual approaches to nature and the built environment – a resurrection of ancient folklores, mythologies and dream-logics. What if we took a more mystical approach to understanding architecture’s role in the natural world, instead of one grounded by science?

Drawing on John Ruskin’s definition of ‘Naturalism’ as ‘the movement of form between the surface and the depth of architectural material’, we will explore a sensorial architecture that traces an alternative history of material extraction by way of myth. Rather than indulging in speculative future abstractions, we will return to a time when folklore guided humankind and the labour of the land, harnessing our shared primordial subconscious to reimagine a different historical lineage and architectural language.

We will test this approach within the Dorset National Landscape, in which the AA’s Hooke Park campus is sited. Here, field settlement patterns, stone walls, historic buildings and archeological sites overlap with the industrial heritage of traditional stone quarrying and a centuries-old rope industry. Like Robinson Crusoe on his tropical island, our unit approach is improvisational and hands-on. Our material explorations will seek to empathise with the unlikely, the feared, the loved and the irrational, creating architectures of the uncanny, surreal and unconscious. Throughout, we will pursue practices of storytelling and craft to move anachronistically into a new architectural present.