Held at Milkwood Permaculture Farm, Mudgee NSW

March 29 – April 1

This second stage development was held in the bosom of permaculture in Mudgee with our partners Milkwood Permaculture’s Nick Ritar and Kirsten Bradley. This stage was dedicated to consolidating the preliminary conceptual build of the project, and move into some construction, using a prototype Yurt to test out the basic structure of the Yurt and to explore design methodologies within the group. As we discovered in the lead up, scouring for the right materials, according to our materials philosophy placed some restrictions on what we could use. This occurred because of the design decision that came out of the first lab determined that only second hand hardwood timbers would be used, which required substantially more time for us to acquire in the volumes that we needed, than was available to us before the second stage lab happened. It was decided to post-pone this prototype build and use the lab time to focus on the full suite of Yurt designs, using a mini yurt build exercise and explore the site based iterations and encounters in a more intensive manner.

A key part of this lab was to situate the exploration of ideas literally and conceptually within Permaculture. Our partners on the project, Milkwood, led by Nick Ritar and Kirsten Bradley, were able to frame our investigations into possible Yurt designs and the principles of permaculture used for approaches and analysis of site. Also having access to their extensive library on Permaculture was extremely beneficial.

This lab also provided an immersive environment for the artists to spend time outside of the workshops to share ideas and explore practice in an unstructured way as we spent time eating and camping on the site together.