Live Build - Bird Hide
The King’s Foundation Building Craft Programme is an eight month programme designed to support those working in the construction industry to push their practical skills and knowldge towards traditional and heritage projects and and the opportunity to work towards a Level 3 NVQ in Heritage Skills.
The timetable consists of a summer school, business skills week, placements in industry and a live build on the estate at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, where the entirety of the student group from various trades come together to design and build a structure within eight to twelve weeks.
This Live Build project gives the students the opportunity to exercise the skills they have amassed throughout the programme, and an opportunity to get involved in other trades, to have a greater understanding of how they should work together and not in isolation. It’s a challenging rewarding final project to round of the programme.
Involvement
The students on the programme have various backgrounds and so a completely varied level of confidence with design skills. I run a series of design workshops to exercise and introduce the students to creative thinking, problem solving and the art of design to build their confidence and get them to a place where they can visually or physically express their ideas and present them accordingly.
The students of 2023 split naturally into three groups and each produced a group design for a bird hide, from a brief created by end-users from the estate. I amalgamated these designs into one, bringing all of their key design decisions into one coherent design, and incorporating as much of each of the trades as possible.
We then built this project within an 8 week timeframe, including foundations and landscaping. What they managed to achieve was outstanding. Read below for the work involved.
Gallery
The Process
The students utilised as much material from the estate as they could. This involved milling all of our own timber, sourcing and shaping all of our own stone, utilising second hand slates, and metal scraps, and collecting, testing and preparing our own clay plaster from the estate. The project was a great success, and the students are very proud of their accomplishments. I couldn’t ask for a better outcome. You can also catch us on BBC2 iPlayer on Countryfile, where the bird hide is featured as part of their series about Dumfries House Estate.
