Andrew Reynolds

Andrew graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2017 with a dual Architecture and Landscape Architecture degree. His studio work throughout RCA has reflected his interest in the role architecture can play in helping limit the damage to the planet while simultaneously benefitting its human and more-than-human inhabitants. He takes great pride in detail and enjoys questioning material flows and the ways in which those materials come together.

Andrew was nominated for the RIBA West Student Prize for his first year work in 2021. Previously he has worked at Haworth Tompkins, garden designer Andy Sturgeon and as a labourer for A.G. Projects in the South East.

Cultivating Wetness

This project challenges the incumbent land use of Romney Marsh, it illustrates a possible alternative which works with the landscape instead of against it. The project intervenes in the existing drainage network by damming and rewetting the land, creating a mosaic of water reed habitat. Blue carbon ecosystems such as these sequester twice as much carbon per hectare than a typical UK forest and create vitally needed habitat for many threatened species such as bittern. As well as being incredibly important ecologically, they help mitigate the local risks of flooding and sea level rise all the while producing more money per hectare for farmers than the existing condition. If done at scale, these habitats can improve not just the environment but equally stimulate a new rural economy around an ancient art - thatch.

The project investigates how we can join, bind and complete carbon negative contemporary buildings which actively improve biodiversity by bringing thatch back in to the twenty first century.

Draining marshland for agriculture is one of the three core acts Europeans have done to control their world since the dawn of capitalism. Lowering the water table and removing species diversity destroys habitat while the act of doing so exposes carbon locked in the peaty soils to the atmosphere where it oxidises to form carbon dioxide.

Rewetting land is a process of increasing the water table. This process removes the need to annually cut into the land, protecting the soil - vitally keeping the carbon locked - and creating important habitat. Rewetting causes an effective 200% swing from land being a carbon emitter to a carbon sink, sequestering 8.3tonnesCO²/hectare annually.

By harvesting reed and sedge to be used in construction as thatch, rewetting can be achieved not at the expense of farmers or other local residents but rather empowers a resilient rural economy. Thatch has a storied history throughout Britain and the world with many beautiful details I have picked up on.

Exploring ways in which to bind off-cut reed into usable materials, led to these studies where hemp is replaced with reed to create wall or floor insulating blocks.

Thatch is a carbon negative and biodiversity positive material. Combining it in myriad ways with local oak and limestone has meant this building has an embodied carbon value of -216,000 tonnes CO²E.

Andrew Reynolds

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Royal College of Art