‘Draftworks' proposes a place for collaborative creative writing and illustration in Dorchester, UK. Revolving around the draft, the sketch, the conversation, and the rehearsal as focal objects and events, the scheme honours the value of process over final product, whilst surfacing wider questions around modern society’s increasing fixation with the latter and lack of established interest in the former.

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The project was driven by an in-depth criticism of contemporary architectural design processes - particularly how many anchor themselves to overriding concepts and/or relatable symbolism for facilitated assimilation in media outlets. ‘Draftworks’ followed an entirely auto-referential design process - a process by which every element in a scheme physically expresses how and why it came to be, without the need of a supporting verbal narrative for its users. 

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The site lies on the border between the busiest urban strip of Dorchester and rural stretches of forest and meadows, with steep level drops, existing retaining walls, a grade-listed prison wall, numerous trees, and an eclectic urban backdrop. These aspects were all treated as thematic nuclei - physical instances that the project would not only actively respond to but strive to give alleviated meaning to.

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The auto-referential design process is fundamentally a lateral one, resulting in an continuous need to jump between types and scales of drawing, whilst actively having to consider several distinct factors at any one time. This resulted in a somewhat chaotic design chronology as there was little linearity in how the scheme developped. Rather than designing from macro to micro, or vice versa, or referring every decision to an underlying ‘concept’, the scheme unfolded similarly to how a writer writes a novel - moments, characters, places and plots are collaged together, ripped apart, modified, and stitched back until a compelling story starts to take shape.