CONTACT
localmattersworkshops@gmail.com

︎︎︎ COMMON HOUSE UPDATE

We are a social making practice. Together we learn, question and create meaning from the landscapes around us.

COMMON:

Adjective
1. Occurring, found, or done often; prevalent.
2. Shared by, coming from, or done by two or more people, groups, or things.

Noun
1. A piece of open land for public use.

PRACTICE:

Adjective
1. The actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it.
2. The customary, habitual, or expected procedure or way of doing of something.

Verb
1. To perform (an activity) or exercise (a skill) repeatedly or regularly in order to acquire, improve or maintain proficiency in it.

Common Practice exists to reconnect people to the productive landscapes that surround them.

From historical land practices to innovations in engineering, social justice movements to ecological complexity, we seek to understand how the world around us has been made and what needs to be considered today as we continually remake it.

Our core objectives are:

1. Enhance the accessibility of productive landscapes

2. Enhance the cultural legibility of productive landscape

3. Boost the cultural legibility of global supply chains and their social and environmental impact.

4. Help to transition local material cultures from ones that are over-reliant on extractive, carbon intensive and culturally reductive supply chains towards a plurality of just an regenarative exchanges between people and place.

^{Our practice developed out of the experiences and lessons gained by living with, in and from our productive material landscapes.}

We came together in 2020 at the Architectural Association’s Hooke Park, designing and making a timber house from the materials that grew in the place we momentarily got to call home. Lessons from the forest which taught of ecology, industry and social relations all worked to further root our methodologies around access through design.

^{Living in and working with a productive ecosystem, we witnessed the vital relationships that exist between materials, landscapes, cultures and craft. We see these multitudes working in conjunction as instruments for meaningful design.}

We view our role as designers as agents of cultural and ecological complexity, connecting and organising a multitude of relationships to affect transformation, leveraging the power of our communities, materials, landscapes and inherited methods of craft and design.

^{We exist on collaboration, constantly formulating new modes of practice in response to the particular circumstances we’re working in.}

We see this network of relations, partners and communities that we work with as a common in itself. Keen to join or have ideas for a project or collaboration?

︎︎︎ Get in touch.