Cultivating a Collective exists as an exploration into changing attitudes towards the ways in which natural resources are cultivated, augmented, and remediated. The project asks how interventions of varying permanence may allow for the creation of space that performs like a landscape – responding to occupation and climate.

The collective nurtures a future rural for the Scottish Highlands. An alternative approach to land tenure as timeshare, sees architectures of varying temperance serve both the land and its inhabitants.

Dwellings act as infrastructure, remediating the degraded bog, while reframing traditional attitudes towards rewilding. A regenerated landscape needn’t be a barren one, as the relationship between architecture, individual and community, highlights the part played by human activity in the generation of rural.

Shielings provide transient housing for two individuals within the drained land, comprising a series of transportable domestic elements; inhabitation activates the rewetting of surface peat over time. Peatland extends the shieling’s domestic space, encouraging a level of primitivism and an architecture in constant negotiation with the outdoors.