Summer Assembly 2026
This summer we are calling together participants from across the globe to join us for an immersive summer school, where across five days, we will assemble and explore contemporary architecture and design, through the prisms of Material, Making, Movement, Maintenance and Myth.
Taking place at Hospitalfield, Arbroath, from 12-17th July, Earth Station will be led by Marf Summers, Becky Little (Rebearth), Soph Dyer and Alison Scott, Akiko Kobayashi and Ben Williams, working with the Architecture Fringe team.
Click here to apply now! Applications close on 24th May at 23:59 GMT.
FAQ's can be found here.
Read on below to find out more...
About the Summer School
In order to meet the demands of our rapidly changing environments it is clear that architects and designers need to work increasingly collaboratively, experimentally and compassionately. A new space of education and exchange, Summer Assembly: Earth Station is a test bed for such practice. One that asks how, through intentionally coming together across disciplines, sharing ideas and experience, we can map out alternative and hopeful futures.
DETAILED INFORMATION
Dates: 12-17 July 2026
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Location
The Summer School will take place at Hospitalfield, Arbroath, Scotland. Dedicated to contemporary art and ideas, Hospitalfield is a place to work, study, and learn.
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Structure of Week
Arriving from midday on Sunday 12th July, the week will start with a welcome meal on the Sunday evening, with group work beginning on Monday morning. A detailed timetable will be issued to successful applicants, and it will involve a mixture of group working, communal sharing of practice, lectures and evening events, and social activities. The school will finish at lunch on Friday 17th July, with a sharing event.
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Ethos
The guiding principles of the Summer School are:
1. Learning 'with'… (collaboration and agency)
2. Learning through doing
3. Learning in layers - Multiple learning styles and opportunities
4. Treading lightly and kindly - being sensitive to the context we're working in
5. Accessible - proactively diverse, inclusive, open, seeking to remove barriers
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Group Focus and Leaders
About the Summer School Projects:
(We're asking participants to choose their group/project preferences in the application form - we will try to allocate everyone to a group of their preference, but can't guarantee this)
1. Insurgent Meteorologies (Sophie ‘Soph’ Dyer and Alison Scott)
Together, we will experiment with radio and sound technologies to create a series of expanded weather forecasts to be broadcast in and outwith Scotland. Resonating with inspiring ideas of the climate beyond the meteorological, stories of Dundee Satellite Receiving Station, and Yazan Khalili’s (Radio Alhara) proposition for new ‘structures of connectivity’, we will reimagine weather forecasting for an era of climate crisis. Our work will be technical, poetic, and political – all at once! To guide us in tuning to local frequencies, we will be joined by Angus-based artist and writer Alison Scott. How we work together will be of equal importance to what we produce.
2. Stone (Butch) Circle (Marf Summers)
Step into the Stone (Butch) Circle, where together we will seek out continuances between the ancient past and the present moment.
As meaningful image making finds itself threatened by an attention economy and uncritical AI use, spontaneous and deeply embodied forms of making take on a new resistant potency. In Stone (Butch) Circle we will engage directly with ancient and contemporary crafts, centring the multi-sensory act of making itself, framing process as performance in its own right. We will explore ideas about (queer) self-fashioning and folk costuming, leaning into uncertainty by making through improvisation and mending.
In the circle, we will question the ways that tools and forms of measurement regulate us, instead using our bodies as yardsticks and fabulating new talismanic utensils. We will expand how we think about time, embracing the non-human and questioning what is and is not animate. Humour and camp sensibilities will be harnessed as subversive ways into the more complex and liberatory ideas present in the things we will make together.
3. The Continuum of Earth (Becky Little)
The Continuum of Earth is an immersive, hands-on workshop exploring earth as a living material shaped through time, practice and place. Learning is rooted in doing - working directly with soil, fibres and simple tools to understand how materials behave, and how they respond to touch, time and environment.
The continuum refers both to states of earth and to a range of vernacular methods. It moves from loose material to bound form, from wet to dry, and from small-scale testing through to construction and sculptural work.
Participants begin by sourcing and testing soils and fibres, then move through mixing and preparation. They work from samples towards larger applications. This includes structural earth such as mudwall or adobe, framed earth or daub, fibrous mixes, light earth for insulation, and surface finishes.
Knowledge emerges through practice and close attention. Making becomes a way of learning from earth itself.
4. Thatch and Scale (Akiko Kobayashi with Ben Williams)
Through the lens of somatic embodied experiences, we will provide an introduction to the craft of thatching at 3.5 scales: the sheltering roof, the subtle body, and the tensioned hand. We will go to visit the context in which the reed grows to glimpse the life of the material before it is harvested, then we will mix some basic lathing and thatching instruction on a small scale building with bodily movement work (butoh) as an exploration of gross motor function and hand knotting work (macrame) as an exercising of fine motor skills.
About the Summer School Facilitators
Insurgent Meteorologies / Sophie 'Soph' Dyer is a designer, artist, and educator whose work explores feminist and anticolonial approaches to weather, climate, and social justice. As co-lead of open-weather, they built accessible tools and infrastructure for DIY satellite imagery reception and decoding. Beyond the arts, Soph’s investigative work contributed to a lawsuit against the New York City Police Department for racial bias in surveillance, and numerous human rights reports through Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab. Twice nominated for the European Union’s S+T+ARTS Prize, they are currently an external advisor to Forensic Architecture and teach at Design Academy Eindhoven. Alison Scott is an artist, writer and art-worker based in Angus. Often working collaboratively, her work responds to places, archives and histories, in writing, performance, and audio/video. Recent projects—drawing on encounters with weather, oil and land—engage with aspects of environmental politics on an everyday, situated level. Her work has recently happened in collaboration with Rachel McBrinn; with Rosie Roberts as ‘again+again’; and with ‘open-weather’. Alison’s work has been supported by organisations such as Travelling Gallery, St Andrews Botanic Gardens, Hospitalfield, Collective, Cove Park and Radiophrenia. She is currently a practice-based PhD researcher at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, focussing on art, forestry and the commons. She has been a member of the Board at GENERATOR Projects, Dundee since 2023.
Stone (Butch) Circle / Marf Summers is an artist, leatherworker, and architect currently living and working in London, UK. Their materially driven practice deals with the hard-won act of embodied craft as a trans person. They create work rooted in the body and senses working in diverse sculptural mediums including leather, sandpaper, silicone and hard candy, tackling the intersections of class, domesticity, gender and sexuality. Their current body of work ‘Standing Stone Butch’, uses the unknowable landscape of prehistory as a portal to interrogate 20th century colonial-capitalist categorisations of queer identity, exploring themes of folklore, myth, and petrification. Marf dramatises their sculptural studio practice through durational live leatherworking and sugar flint-knapping performances, seeking to reveal urgent intersections between trans embodiment, alternative masculinities, and manual craft practices.
Marf is also the architect behind a number of community spaces for the London’s queer and trans communities, and was named a RIBA Rising Star in 2023. They have worked with a number of major London Institutions, and their work has been exhibited internationally. They are currently part of the Conditions Studio Programme in Croydon.
The Continuum of Earth / Becky Little is an artist/builder and teacher working with natural materials, communities and place. With over 30 years of experience across construction, conservation and art, she specialises in building with earth and working directly with soil.
Her work is grounded in specific places. Ecological relationships, material agency and heritage are revealed through making. She moves between building, sculpture and public engagement, bringing practical skill together with shared enquiry and learning.
Her current work explores more reciprocal approaches to construction. It shifts away from extractive models towards ways of building that respond to land, materials and more-than-human worlds. Through workshops and collaborative projects, she invites others to work directly with earth as a living material, and to recognise building as a relationship with the ground beneath us.
Thatch and Scale / Akiko Kobayashi is a Teaching Fellow, Skatepark Designer and Architectural Consultant supporting third sector clients such as women’s charities, skills development initiatives and youthwork organisations. Projects have included an award-winning youth centre, self-build adventure playgrounds and being a design advisor to midwives. Akiko also has experience in a variety of construction trades such as site & workshop joinery, plumbing and plastering.
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Accomodation
Accomodation will be a mix of camping, and accomodation in Hospitalfield buildings, where participants would have their own bedroom and shared washing facilities/bathrooms.
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Catering
A full vegetarian menu will be provided for all participants, throughout the week, and is included in the costs below.
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Cost
There are;
16 Early-Bird Places (£475 / £625)
16 Standard Places (£475 / £625)
8 Supported Places (free)
Costs include accomodation and all catering (vegetarian menu) for the whole week. Participants would need to fund and arrange their own travel to and from Hospitalfield.
We are providing 8 supported (free) places for people who would otherwise be prohibited from taking part due to cost.
Payment for participation in the Summer School would be required by Sunday 14th June.
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Terms of Engagement
All participants of the Summer School need to be 18 years old or over. All participants agree to take part in the Summer School as outlined above, in a respectful manner, and with care and consideration for fellow participants.
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Application process
Click here to apply now! Applications close on 24th May at 23:59 GMT. All applicants will be notified by 31st May 2026 as to whether they have a place at Summer Assembly: Earth Station. Payment for participation in the Summer School would be required by Sunday 14th June. We unfortunately cannot provide detailed feedback on applications, but have designed the application process to be short and (hopefully) easy to engage with. Thank you for your interest, thank you for reading this far (!) and we hope to see you at the Architecture Fringe Summer School 2026!