Process is the work that survives the project.
The archive is the studio's memory and, increasingly, its training data. We open a fresh archive folder at the start of every commission and we close it — literally tie it with a tape ribbon — at the end. This sheet is the index of what currently lives in the steel cabinet behind the writing room.
The two kinds of archive.
There are two archives at this studio, in two physical places. The process archive is the one this sheet is indexing: drawings, notebooks, constraint books, model cards, and printed studies from every commission. It is open, on a Wednesday-by-appointment basis, to anyone with a serious reason. The client archive is the body of training material a client has shared with us under contract; it is not on this site and never will be, and the entire archive is shredded or returned at handover. We mention the second only so the first cannot be misread.
The process archive is also, slowly, becoming a kind of internal teaching corpus. We have started training small models on the studio's own drawings, partly to see what an honest auto-archivist would suggest, and partly because the partners have been told to take more holidays and the constraint books need maintaining anyway.
The folders, by year.
- 2025 · Q3Atelier Foundry — survey sheetsForty-two hand drawings made during the first three weeks of N° 014, before any model existed. The constraint book grew out of these.
- 2025 · Q3Bone & Lacquer — joinery detailsDetail studies for N° 015. Eight different mortise-and-tenon variations, only three of which the client approved for training.
- 2025 · Q2Constraint Canvas — failure boardA wall of model outputs that we hung in the studio for three weeks, with red pencil annotations. Most of the rules in the final constraint book trace back to a specific failure here.
- 2024 · Q4Identity Loom — type drawingsThe first 26 lowercase letters of the bespoke typeface, hand-drawn before any computer touched them. The model learned from these, not the other way round.
- 2024 · Q3Calcareous — paving studiesTracing-paper overlays of a Bath square, each one trying a different rhythm of stone. The final model never improved on the seventh overlay.
- 2024 · Q2Loadbearing — physics sketchesQuick hand calculations of cantilever moments. They look pretentious in the archive but were genuinely necessary at the time.
- 2024 · Q1Marl — first commission, all of itThe whole folder for N° 001 in one tape-tied bundle. We re-read it once a year on the studio's birthday.
The drift, made visible.
We rewrite the studio manifesto annually and we keep every previous revision. The drift between them is the most honest record of what we have learned and what we have changed our minds about. Each is dated and signed by the four partners on the title sheet.
- Rev. 06 — Aug 2025Current manifestoEleven articles. The labour question section is new. Read.
- Rev. 05 — Feb 2025Founding revisionNine articles. Written the week the company was incorporated. The refusal list was half its current length.
- Rev. 04 — Oct 2024Pre-incorporation working draftWritten when the studio was still a four-person evening project. The article "no surprise outputs" did not yet exist; we needed a surprise to find that out.
- Rev. 03 — Jun 2024The "atelier or factory" draftA long, indulgent six-page draft we wrote during the Volute commission. The partner who wrote most of it has since apologised in writing.
- Rev. 02 — Mar 2024The first manifesto we showed anyoneThree paragraphs. A senior architect we admire read it and gave back useful notes; many of them are still in the current revision.
- Rev. 01 — Jan 2024A list of things we would not doTwelve refusals on the back of a paper napkin. The studio is, in many ways, still drawn from that napkin.
The most boring artefact of every commission.
Every commission produces a constraint book — the printed, bound document that lists every rule the model is meant to obey, written in plain English with diagrams. These are usually a hundred to three hundred pages, with hand-drawn diagrams interleaved. They are dull. They are the most useful thing we make.
We keep one copy of every constraint book in the archive, with the client's permission. About half of the books are shareable in part; the rest are sealed for between two and twenty years depending on the client's confidentiality preferences. The shareable ones we will read with visiting practitioners on archive Wednesdays.
The conversations we needed to have.
We log every studio visit in a hardback book that lives on the kitchen table. Names, dates, what we drew together, what was disagreed about. It is partly a courtesy to visitors and partly because we have learned that some of the most useful arguments are with the practitioner who came in for coffee and stayed for an opinion.
So far the visitor's log has 137 entries. The shortest is one line ("Bran · 14 March · talked about nothing, made better tea than us"). The longest runs to six pages and is from a visiting type designer whose review of a draft typeface saved us two months.
Things that were not quite work.
The bottom drawer of the cabinet is for ephemera: studio postcards we printed for the opening; a small zine on constraint-first design that we made for a Bath bookshop; a single laminated photograph of Vellum sleeping on a model card from N° 006. We make about one piece of ephemera a year and we give it away. The drawer is also, technically, where the receipts live; the accountant has a key.
If you would like to visit the archive
Write a sentence about what you would like to look at and we will tell you which Wednesday is good. There is no fee, no NDA, and no obligation to commission anything afterwards. The archive is open because process should be.