The Avebury Seed Barrow

The Avebury Seed Barrow project is set within the Neolithic and agricultural context of Avebury in Wiltshire, UK. Environmentally re-appropriating the Neolithic Long-Barrow notions to ‘seal, bury and preserve’ valuable objects for millennia, the project proposes a local seed bank which preserves seeds and biodiversity for future generations. A levelled chalk landscape of buried and sunken seed chambers, courtyard orchards, growing gardens and feasting spaces, allow the community to participate in acts of biodiversity conservation while fostering social connection.

The Seed Barrow project emerged from a human and machine collaboration, which used machine learning technologies and analogue model-making practices. The process traversed an intersection between the physical and digital, through a dialogue of interpretations between human and machine minds, where machine learning became a tool to challenge one’s mind beyond the limitations of habit and learned convention. The project questions the generative potentials of drawings and visual media by pursuing new methods of translating drawings to buildings. This collaborative conversation highlights the importance of ‘interpretation’ within architecture by embracing mistranslations; with an understanding that from design to use, through the hands of society as future collaborators, a project will be continuously reinterpreted.