The second edition of Reading Design, the annual summer school at Grymsdyke Farm in Buckinghamshire, will take place over four weeks this summer.
Reading Design is a hands-on design workshop and residency bringing together students, designers and educators to explore the relationship between making, material and place through process-led experimentation. This year the learning programme will be complemented by a series of talks by eminent thinkers and practitioners, and the scope of practice will be expanded to include art, poetry and performance.
Reading Design takes place in the rural setting of Grymsdyke Farm, a working research and fabrication space. Participants work with invited tutors, each specialising in different materials and techniques, to develop site-specific design responses. These are shaped by the local context and by direct engagement with tools, materials and processes. Rather than being set assignments with fixed outcomes, students are given prompts as starting points for open-ended experimentation.
The summer school runs over four weeks with students rotating between tutors and projects. The outcomes —often experimental furniture, objects, or installations — will be exhibited in the autumn, highlighting the programme’s commitment to collaborative, process-driven design.
Farm Party will be a celebration of Reading Design, and an opportunity for students, architects, patrons and visitors to come together in the grounds of the farm for food, music and dancing.
‘The phenomenon of a fall could be described as a segment of a movement towards the center of the earth. This very moment countless objects on the earth are taking part in this centripetal event.’
Spatial Poem No.3, Mieko Shiomi, 1966
This theme for the 2025 summer school is ‘Falling’ inspired by the action poems and instruction-based practice of Mieko Shiomi. Falling is a condition that is both physical and conceptual, sudden and gradual. In Spatial Poem No.3 Shiomi invited participants to record an intentional effort to make something fall.
Reading Design will invite participants to consider the effect of a loss of control, shift in balance and the possibility of reorientation. How does falling trigger spatial, material and performative responses, and what do we notice when we fall?
Students will be invited to create a series of human body-sized objects using materials sourced from Grymsdyke Farm, particularly offcuts and remnants from earlier projects. The emphasis is on working with what already exists: the leftover, the unstable and the in-between.
Daily activities include hands-on making, lectures and talks, discussions around the dinner table, reading and research in the library, guided walks and tutor-led workshops.
Participants will work with all four tutor groups in turn, developing an evolving response to a shared set of instructions. Each week will be led by a different design team, exploring the theme of falling through site-specific processes, materials and dialogue.
Falling with:
Maurizio Altieri
Marco Campardo
FOS
Laura Houseley
Leonard Koren
Guan Lee
Luca Lo Pinto
Yeoryia Manolopoulou
Rujiana Rebernjak
Vicky Richardson
Soft Baroque
Lorenzo Vitturi
