This is an excerpt from 'Common Treasures Book Two: Housing, Planning and Construction' (Little Toller Books, 2025) by Loretta Bosence.

WINTER

A harsh wind scours the building site. Repeated cycles of frost and thaw expand, contract, and shatter wet lime mortar. By the same action, slates cleave from the stone lying in the yard. The days are short, and the cold is bitter on the hands. The clay heap dug in finer weather is alternately soaked with rain, frozen and dried by the gales. In the reedbeds, summer nests are washed or blown away, their architects distant or dormant. In the woods, leaves have fallen, and sap sulks at the roots. So reads the diary of a builder of the past, present or future who observes the seasons.

But seasonality is absent from the modern construction programme. Container ships and long-haul lorries wait in the early morning, dark and cold, to unload their monolithic cargoes of weather-resistant materials to time-pressed site managers. Contract completion dates, time penalty clauses, planning frameworks, and fears of financial risk are the conditions on which the seasons of building turn. Time is urgent and linear, like a canalised river in spate. In pursuit of infinite economic growth, finite earthly materials are extracted with force, only to advance at varying speeds through production and construction towards untimely redundancy and waste. Monocultures of industrial forestry and agriculture, destructive material extraction and entangled, cascading global supply chains leave us dangerously vulnerable to disease, disaster and system collapse. The high-energy requirements of machinery and infrastructure tasked with pushing against natural conditions lead to well-documented, dire consequences for planetary life. When resources run low in developed nations, neo-colonial asset stripping holds the world in a state of vast inequality and conflict.

Britain enjoys a rich diversity of geology, weather patterns, organic life and surrounding landscapes, yet new homes and streets and the activities of their builders and inhabitants take on an eerie similarity. Industrial-scale land use and construction require large, expensive, specialist tools, networks and data systems to reliably overcome the constraints of the seasons. Such methods are out of reach to most people, leading to a loss of agency, where outsider experts and wealthy stakeholders decide the form of housing and the shape of communities, even in traditionally hands-on rural landscapes. For all people, rural or urban, this situation renders the loss of something even more precious — our reciprocal, life-affirming, working relationship with the earth and other non-human beings.

Working with the seasons involves overcoming a multitude of practical challenges. Results are uncontrollable, unpredictable and not-so-easily quantifiable. Crafting a good product with such inconsistent conditions and materials requires care, close attention and deep understanding. Being present to the changing landscape and its fleeting opportunities requires costly labour and time. It is a financial risk to lay oneself bare to such uncertainty. The conventional sequences of architecture and construction are unsympathetic to the constant revisions and cycles of the seasons. But looked at another way, these not-insignificant challenges can be transformed into opportunities — for the revival and development of a low-carbon approach to the construction of our built environment, one that restores both ecological and cultural relationships. The full year’s turning, which reaches a supposed end in desolate winter, connects life to death as last year’s decayed remains revive into a new cycle of growth.

SPRING

Swallows return with the warm air and last of the frosts, so lime work can at last resume. The clay dug last autumn is ready, after the winter’s weathering, to be tempered and processed. Frost-split slates are dressed to size for roof tiles. The fields are sown with hemp, rye and flax for fibre and oil. The water reed, cut before nesting birds arrived, is bound and stored for thatching. Twenty-year old sweet chestnut poles, cut close to the ground over winter, are stacked ready for cleaving and milling in situ. Strong new shoots unfurl from their coppice stool.

Seasonality is a cyclical flow of interconnected natural phenomena set in constant motion by the influence of our planet’s position relative to the sun and our neighbour, the moon. It also encompasses ways of thinking and doing that bend and flex with these movements — habits that have become temporarily obscured from our cultural consciousness, at least where building is concerned.

Prior to the late 1940s — before wartime advances in mass material production and an urgent drive for cheap, fast housing — the progress and tasks of construction were governed by tide, wind, water levels, heat and humidity, frost and thaw, sunshine hours, the rising of sap, and the life rhythms and activities of other organisms. The form of buildings, and their surroundings, was particular to the physical conditions of the territory and the cultures that evolved with each distinctive place. Material scarcity and seasonal variability were drivers of innovation and vocational discipline. The pace and quality of construction were governed by the availability of skilled labour (much diminished post-war). Rural people are especially employed in diverse, complementary skills across the year in various land-based jobs. When the last of the winter lines were hauled in, fishermen would head to the coastal building site for work. Late-summer hop-pickers would finish their harvest just in time to begin digging clay and loading brickyard kilns in autumn. It was the deep knowledge of landscape insiders that slowly, incrementally, shaped vernacular building crafts and ways of being that are seen only in imitation today.

The repetitive toil of poorly paid labour and the ‘chronic insecurity of everyday life’¹ of an archaic rural working class is not something to aspire to. Nostalgia and romanticism have their own part to play in perpetuating an alienating, linear model of construction, in which the vernacular becomes a style, rather than an edifying, immersive process. With vernal renewal comes an awakening to new possibilities and a fresh opportunity to critically reassess and improve upon past practices.

The experience of seasonal time, as it is felt by many indigenous cultures across the world, is not so much a riverine, linear chronology of events but a lake in which present moments collect and gently circulate along with those of the past and the future. To work effectively with natural cycles is to take advantage of opportunities as they arise, without having to apply force, without having to rush, or even move, letting time and weather do the hard work — as factory-saw-cut slate is to the frost-split stone. In an infinitely sustainable, reciprocal working relationship with(in) ecosystems, inputs, additives and energy are lower, and waste is anathema. Machine energy is reduced and carefully, tactically combined with human labour. This approach privileges lived experience and close observation. This presence of mind and body in the landscape can have restorative benefits for individual inhabitants and their communities, as well as the ecosystems of which they are part.

SUMMER

Clay bricks dry hard in the hot, still air. Sheep are relieved of their dense fleeces, which are quickly graded and rolled into bales for insulation and wool carpets. Ripened long-stalked wheat is cut and bound into sheaves and stood up on end in stooks to dry in the field. Hemp is mown and left strewn on the ground to rest, letting morning dew split the stalks’ woody cores from their fibrous husks. The building site is thrumming with life and activity — now is the time! The harvest is beginning. Make the most of fine weather and long days, for neither will last forever.

Plants, the most sustainable material source of the seasonal builder, capture carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. Under the stewardship of skilled land managers, methods of propagation and cultivation can be gentle, working in symbiosis with ecological systems to improve biodiversity. A good harvest can supply an impressive array of building trades. Wheat straw, reed and rye are used for thatch roofing, straw bale and cob walling. Flax is pressed for linseed oil and paint. Hard and softwoods are thinned and coppiced from mixed woodlands for timber framing and joinery. The smaller ‘chips’, branches, poles and even bark can be used for fencing, internal walls and cladding. Even animal by-products have their uses, with wool for insulation and carpets. Milk can be processed into casein for wood glue. Globally, the vernacular building crafts that make use of these biologically derived materials, along with site-won earth and stone, rely on pools of indigenous and localised knowledge that are in rapid decline. Conflicts with standardised construction procedures, economic efficiencies and dominant aesthetic narratives of the successful home and lifestyle mean that these practices are no longer in demand.

Emerging technologies in construction build on the enduring vernacular understanding of organic materiality and enlist the latest science to transform biological matter into super-materials that are benign and yet also have the qualities and strength required for advanced architectural application. Fungi, hemp and other waste plant fibre, small-dimension timber, vegetable enzymes and cellulose can be processed and engineered into bio-composite alternatives for structural components: ‘concrete’, sheet boards, insulation, plastics, adhesives, fixtures and fittings.

Technical solutions of bio-mimicry and robotic efficiency applied to irregular, crooked nature promise a future of guilt-free business-as-usual development. But, while these technologies will be an essential element of regenerative construction in the future, the goal is not to maintain the current unsustainable pace of growth. The true power and potential of seasonal landscape materials lie in their contingent scale, tempo and accessibility — their ability to be creatively manipulated and applied incrementally, only when needed, using existing tools and agricultural infrastructure. Seasonality, then, is also about using less to do more, recognising abundance where it already exists.

AUTUMN

Summer migrants, martins and swallows, gather en-masse on telephone wires in the westering sun, ready to leave their barn home, whose stores are filled with hemp, flax and wheat. Work on the building site slows, and efforts turn to processing the harvest for next year’s materials. Clay is dug when softened by mists and light rain before it is sodden and heavy from the deluge to come. Sheep graze the tired wheat field, which has been put to rest under a restorative cover of clover, vetch and ryegrass. The force of sap subsides in the chestnut trees, leaves curl and fade, and the sawyers sharpen their tools. As the days cool and darken, so does the mind. Time to gather in and reflect on the rewards of summer while making plans for winter. How will we weather the coming year better than the one before?

The seasonal landscape is not just a resource to be exploited but also an instructor in how to live well and prosper within planetary limits. In order for the colossal environmental impact of construction to be reduced once more, a significant transformation of these activities needs to take place. This cannot happen within a business-as-usual framework. Development is synonymous with progress and exponential growth — but perhaps growth and progress need not be material. By thinking differently about risk, time, scale and labour, there could be a change of emphasis from the one-way growth of capital via extractive and destructive processes to an allembracing growth in value and meaning for those who have a stake in a place through careful retention of resources, reverence for the environment and increased agency for inhabitants. There are principles for action, learnt from engaging with the seasons in other realms, that can support and expedite positive changes of practice in construction and behaviour in leadership:

We can reconsider timeliness, so that efficiency aligns first and foremost with the ebb and flow of seasonal cycles and availability of natural materials. Instead of forcing against the elements, we can save valuable energy by letting weather do the hard work and choosing to do things when environmental conditions are ecologically and operationally favourable. A more flexible, responsive building programme, that allows for these fluctuations and makes early preparations for approaching cycles need not be at odds with commercial or societal goals, if we recognise the true value of these processes. Patient and responsive systems can enable a dynamic, organic process of development, working piece by piece towards an aggregation of effects rather than a singular solution delivered at a precise moment.

Diversity in nature is a strength. If we can build tolerance for it in our systems of consumption and construction, then society can also enjoy the benefits of that resilience. Aesthetic and functional variations wrought by capricious weather and local geology can also be enjoyed for their richness and particularity. Material codes, assessment and certification can be receptive to and positively enable the approval of a rich palette of non-standard materials, low-impact crafts and regional building methods.

The ultimate way to be responsive, to cope with scarcity and to make the best use of a seasonal glut, or an unpredictable stream of small batches, is to prepare — accumulating and protecting a store of materials for harder times. The working period of a construction project can be extended to include time for collection, testing and processing of materials in the dark and cold months before the rush of summer.

Large-scale capital construction projects require intensive bursts of investment in high-energy industries, strictly constrained within a fixed window in time. A change in sympathies and spending, towards an abundance of modest buildings made from less durable materials, shaped over time, can use a fraction of the energy and leave a legacy of investment in people — in reciprocal cultures of engagement and mutual care. Value can be intercepted for distributed rural economies, which may otherwise become lost in distant parts of the supply chain, when the established farm gate-to-table model is applied to procurement of seasonal construction materials.

People who live by the seasons become masters of cooperation, of give and take. The task for the coming years is one of reconnection, between silos of global and local knowledge, between those who need the resources of the landscape and those who manage and care for it. Planners, designers, builders, farmers, foresters and ecologists must pool skills and support one another in pursuit of shared goals. Those who live in a home built in the spirit of seasonality will also benefit from a greater connection to place as the materials that constitute the fabric of their homes speak quietly of their landscape origins.

A slower, more thoughtful pace, responsive to ecological context, and a realignment of the building calendar to the seasons of the earth opens up new opportunities. We can purposefully feel our way, embed ourselves in place, respond, sometimes build, but always care for the things we are so lucky to already have. We need a new narrative for building and dwelling. Not a hyperbolic series of isolated, one-dimensional stories, each with a hero, a beginning and an ending, but a hypnotic song in the round, where many unassuming, interdependent voices create complex layers of meaning, beauty and belonging in the constant revolution of the seasons.

Book

Common Treasures Book Two: Housing Planning and Construction (Little Toller Books, 2025) is the second anthology in the Common Treasures project — edited by James Binning, Amica Dall, Sara Pereira and Giles Smith — developed from a series of conversations between the architecture collective Assemble and the arts organisation Common Ground.

It takes as its premise the idea that approaches to housing that are grounded in greater levels of community ownership, management and maintenance have the potential to empower communities, overcome the opposition to local development and create conditions in which skilled rural workers are part of stronger local networks of industry and agriculture.

The contributors to this anthology share their work to overcome the many obstacles to this way of working, and offer a vision which is grounded, imaginative and hopeful.

Bio

Loretta Bosence is a researcher, designer, and co-founder of Local Works Studio. The studio takes a landscape-led approach to design, using site-based resources and processes to plan, make, and repair. Loretta teaches and writes on issues related to vernacular placemaking and planning.

Notes

1 Mike Savage, “Class and Labour History,” in Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labour History, ed. Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden (Berghahn Books, 2002), 61.