UNDER CONSTRUCTION by Takeshi Hayatsu & collaborators

Under Construction was an evolving collaborative architecture project that unfolded at the Stanley Picker Gallery between September and December 2024. The exhibition surveyed over a decade of ambitious live-build projects led by architect Takeshi Hayatsu, working with Kingston University Architecture and Landscape students alongside a growing network of participants and community partners (including 121 Collective, The Community Brain, Citizen Zoo, and more). Since 2011, these projects have provided imaginative and resourceful responses to sites across Kingston, Surbiton, Tolworth and beyond, always rooted in collaboration with local communities.

For the exhibition, 121 Collective reconstructed past projects using a range of craft techniques while guiding a new live-build process with Kingston School of Art’s MArch Unit 5 students. Together they created a rammed earth entrance structure and a prefabricated sauna along the Hogsmill river, drawing on an ethos of “Slow Architecture”: small, carefully made interventions that grow into long term, place based change. Clay sourced in London and recycled brick were processed by hand, allowing students to learn the material’s properties before assembling them into the final structures.

The making itself became a social act. Forest school children decorated panels with foraged materials, local residents plastered the sauna walls with clay, and students immersed themselves in the embodied knowledge of working with earth. This collective, hands-on process captures our ongoing interest in material-driven design, participatory making and architecture as a shared cultural practice.

Under Construction was featured in The Guardian’s 2024 Design Highlights.

Photographs are credited to Jim Stephenson.