Invisible Studio

Invisible Studio is an innovative and award winning architecture practice founded by Piers Taylor. Taylor is a Chartered Architect, was the inaugural Studio Master at the Architectural Association for the Design & Make Programme at Hooke Park, a former Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge, a founding director at Mitchell Taylor Workshop, an anniversary scholarship PhD Candidate at the University of Reading, an external examiner at the Arts University, Bournemouth and the Convenor of Studio in the Woods. Invisible Studio is led by Piers Taylor with architect Kate Darby, who currently teaches at the Welsh School of Architecture and the Architectural Association

Invisible Studio aims to be a different organisation from a conventional practice. We operate through collaboration, experimentation, research and education. We work internationally and very locally, in a variety of fields and at a variety of scales. We operate from a self built studio located in a working woodland which we also manage as an ongoing forest enterprise alongside practice, and have pioneered a number of academic programmes that rethink the relationship between design and making. We are not interested in making as a mechanism for simply providing us with some new form-making techniques which are inflected by their material realisation, but instead, in terms of how material practice can address social and political questions

With each project, we aim to realise something extraordinary. We are interested in going about the process of architecture in a different way – a way where clients, users, collaborators and makers are all part of the process of design, and sometimes construction. More than anything, we are interested in making unusual, delightful and intelligent buildings and environments that are thorough, considered and exceptional, and have a wider consequence outside their own material actuality. Our work encompasses a number of seminal buildings from ecologically sensitive self builds through to schools, community and public buildings and large scale urban environments

Our work has been published widely and internationally and has won a plethora of awards including a number of RIBA National, Regional and Sustainability Awards, Wood Awards, WAN Awards, the AJ Small Projects Award and has been shortlisted for the Stephen Lawrence Prize. With our work, we aim to push boundaries from material research through to wider environmental concerns. We aim to tackle issues of climate change from first principles, where big issues are addressed head on. In terms of technology, we prefer to use passive principles to aid building performance, and use these principles to define the premise of a building. We are unusual in that we are ‘hands-on’ and often construct our own projects within the wider team that is Invisible Studio