Turn! Turn! Turn!
Building with the seasons - Winter & Spring
I was commissioned to write this piece in 2022 by architecture collective Assemble and the arts organisation Common Ground, in response to the question ‘What is the future of rural communities?’. Common Treasures is a new series of books that gathers essays about climate adaptation, food production and land use, and presents them as alternatives to the prevailing political discourse. The full version of this essay will be published by Little Toller in Book 2 of the Common Treasures series ‘Housing, planning & construction’ in September 2025. Written by people who are working on the ground and in the fields, contributors include:
, Rob Hopkins & Frances Northrop, Ruth Munns, Andrew Kirby, James Shorten, Hana Loftus, Barbara Jones, , , Tim Crabtree & Summer IslamI will share the concluding parts of this essay ‘Summer & Autumn’ in July.
Winter
A harsh wind scours the winter building site. Repeated freeze and thaw expands, contracts and shatters wet lime mortar. Slates cleave from the stone lying in the yard by the same action. The cold is bitter on the hands and days are short. The clay heap, dug in finer weather, is alternately saturated, frozen and dried by the gales. In the reedbeds summer nests are washed or blown away, their architects distant or dormant. In the woods leaves have fallen and sap sulks at the roots.
So reads the diary of a builder, of the past, present or future, who observes the seasons. But seasonality is absent from the modern construction program and its associated industries never sleep. Container ships and long-haul lorries wait in the early morning dark and cold to unload their monolithic cargoes of weather-resistant materials to time-pressed site managers, enabling year-round development in cities, towns and villages across Britain. Contract completion dates, time penalty clauses, planning frameworks and fear of financial risk are the conditions on which the new seasons of building turn. Time is urgent and linear, like a canalized river in spate. In pursuit of infinite economic growth, finite earthly materials are extracted with force, only to advance at varying speeds through production and construction towards untimely redundance and waste. Monocultures of industrial forestry and agriculture, destructive material extraction and entangled, cascading global supply chains leave us dangerously vulnerable to disease, disaster and system collapse. The high-energy requirements of machinery and infrastructure tasked with pushing against natural systems, as well as the toxic inputs and outputs of this activity, lead to well documented, dire consequences for planetary life. When resources run low in developed nations, neo-colonial asset stripping holds the world in a state of vast inequality and conflict.
Britain enjoys a rich diversity of geology, weather patterns, landscape and organic life, yet new homes and streets and the activities of their builders and inhabitants take on an eerie similarity. Industrial scale land use and construction requires large, expensive, specialist tools, networks and data systems to reliably overcome the constraints of the seasons. Such methods are out of reach to most people, inevitably leading to a loss of agency, where the outsider expert and wealthy stakeholder decide the form of housing and shape of communities, even in traditionally hands-on rural landscapes. For all people, rural or urban, this situation renders the loss of something even more precious – our reciprocal, life-affirming, quotidian working relationship with the earth and other non-human beings.
Working with the seasons involves overcoming a multitude of practical challenges. Results are uncontrollable, unpredictable and not-so-easily quantifiable. Crafting a good product with such inconsistent conditions and materials requires care, close attention and deep understanding. Being present to the changing landscape and its fleeting opportunities requires costly labour and time. It is a financial risk to lay oneself bare to such uncertainty. The conventional sequences of architecture and construction are unsympathetic to the constant revisions and cycles of the seasons. But looked at another way, these not-insignificant challenges can be transformed into opportunities – for the revival and development of a low-carbon approach to the construction of our built environment, one that restores both ecological and cultural relationships. The full year’s turning, which reaches a supposed end in desolate winter, connects life to death as last year’s decayed remains revive into a new cycle of growth.
Spring
Swallows return with the warm air and last of the frosts, so lime work can at last resume. The clay dug last autumn is ready now, after the winter’s weathering, to be tempered and processed. Frost-split slates are dressed to size for roof tiles. The fields are sown with hemp, rye and flax, for fibre and oil. The water reed cut before nesting birds arrived, is bound and stored for thatching. Twenty-year-old sweet chestnut poles, cut close to the ground over winter, are stacked ready for cleaving and milling in situ. Strong new shoots unfurl from their coppice stool.
The concept of seasonality refers to a cyclical flow of myriad interconnected natural phenomena set in constant motion by the influence of our planet’s position relative to the sun and our neighbour the moon. It also encompasses ways of thinking and doing that bend and flex with these movements - habits that have become briefly, temporarily, obscured from our cultural consciousness, at least where construction of our built environment is concerned.
Prior to the late 1940’s - before wartime advances in mass material production and an urgent drive for cheap, fast housing - the progress and tasks of construction were governed by time, tide, wind, water levels, heat and humidity, frost and thaw, sunshine hours, the rising of sap, and the interconnected life rhythms and activities of other organisms. The form of buildings, and their surroundings, was particular to the physical conditions of the territory and the cultures that evolved with each distinctive place. Material scarcity and seasonal variability were drivers of innovation and vocational discipline. The pace and quality of construction was governed by the availability of skilled labour (much diminished post-war). Rural people especially, employed diverse complementary skills across the year, in various land-based jobs. When the last of the winter lines were hauled in, fishermen would head to the coastal building site for work. Late-summer hop-pickers would finish their harvest just in time to begin digging clay and loading brickyard kilns in autumn. It was the deep knowledge of landscape insiders that slowly, incrementally, shaped vernacular building crafts and ways of being, seen only in imitation today.
The repetitive toil of poorly paid labour, and the ‘chronic insecurity of everyday life’ of an archaic rural working class, is not something to aspire to. Nostalgia and romanticism have their own part to play in the perpetuation of an alienating, linear model of construction, in which the ‘vernacular’ becomes an aesthetic style, rather than an edifying, immersive process. With vernal renewal comes an awakening to new possibilities, a chance to ‘pour fresh instruction o’er the mind’, but also a fresh opportunity to critically reassess and improve upon past practices. The experience of seasonal, landscape time, as it is felt by many indigenous cultures across the world, is not so much a riverine linear chronology of events, but a lake in which present moments collect and gently circulate along with those of the past and the future.
Production and construction need not be constrained by living processes and events, from which we are isolated and separate. Through concerted engagement with natural cycles, it is possible to take maximum advantage of opportunities as they arise, without having to apply force, without having to rush, or even to move - letting time and weather do the hard work – as factory-saw-cut slate is to the frost-split stone. In an infinitely sustainable reciprocal working relationship with(in) ecosystems, inputs, additives and energy are lower, and waste is anathema. Machine energy is reduced and carefully, tactically combined with human labour. This approach privileges lived experience, close observation and a deep understanding of the land. This presence of mind and body in the landscape can have restorative benefits for individual inhabitants and their communities, as well as the ecosystems of which they are part.
Bibliography
(An unnecessarily long list, but these are genuinely the books I referred to whilst writing ‘Building with the seasons’ and I thought that you might enjoy digging into them).
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