With robots made from sausage-stuffers in the barn and follies in the fields, Grymsdyke Farm is the ideal place for students to experiment with new technologies and local materials. Its creators explain why every village needs a robot

In an old barn in the rolling Chilterns, white globules drip from the rafters, while strange fungal forms erupt from the floor. In a shed next door, coils of grey clay spiral upwards into chubby stumps, like a line of elephants’ feet, while robotic rumblings can be heard through the wall. As horses roam among mysterious objects scattered in the fields outside, it looks as if this innocuous farmhouse in the Buckinghamshire banker-belt has been subject to an alien invasion, overrun by sculptural parasites.

“We’re not quite sure what this place is turning into,” says Guan Lee, the jovial proprietor of Grymsdyke Farm, an architectural research centre that has evolved in the leafy idyll of Lacey Green over the last five years. “We don’t really have a plan – but I suppose that’s the beauty of it. People come with their own projects and contribute ideas, and it all goes off in a new direction.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fungal forms … Guan Lee’s casting experiments hang from the barn’s rafters. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright

Teaching on architecture programmes at the University of Westminster, the Royal College of Art and the Bartlett at UCL, where he completed his own PhD last year, Lee conceived the farm as a live lab for experimental making, a place where students can do more than their cramped school workshops allow. A kind of nascent high-tech cottage industry, it draws on the area’s long history as a place of production – a brick-making hub as early as the 1300s, and centre of the furniture industry in nearby High Wycombe, home of Ercol and G-Plan. “The work we do here is really embedded in the place,” says Lee. “It’s about a living, working practice that combines traditional materials and techniques with new technology.”

I first visited five years ago, while a student at the Royal College of Art, when we made use of the farm’s CNC-milling machine to build a plywood pavilion from reclaimed Olympic hoardings. Since then, the place has seen groups of students come and go, taking part in communal workshops that have an ad hoc, collective feel, with a faint air of the rural revels of Victorian arts and crafts guilds. “Food is really important,” grins Lee, walking into the walled kitchen garden where students built a 60-person banqueting table last year, barbecue pits cast into its concrete top – and a space to spit-roast a hog in the middle. Elsewhere on the farm there is a catenary arch of handmade clay bricks, dug up from the field, and a wall-size origami metal screen, as well as what was once a curious honeycomb-igloo of hexagonal plaster tiles, now an even stranger ruin, destroyed by inquisitive sheep. As the follies have accrued, so the workshops have expanded: they now include everything from a CNC milling machine to 3D-printers, water-jet cutters to ceramics kilns, laser-cutters to casting studios – and a gigantic robotic arm.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brick folly … Terracott by Samantha Oswald, built of hand-made bricks dug from local clay. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright

“This is our latest toy,” says Lee, taking me into a room where the big orange robot (a cast-off from a car production line) is deftly rotating a small circular plate, like an accomplished waiter performing tricks with a tray. A meat grinder spews a continuous tube of grey clay on to the wooden plate from a nozzle, coiling layer upon layer to form an elegant worm-cast column.

It is a project by graduate students from the Bartlett, looking at bespoke architectural casting: the clay forms a hollow mould, into which concrete is poured, then it can be scraped off and re-used. It leaves a corduroy finish, determined by the width of the nozzle, and can be formed in all manner of shapes, limited only by what can be conjured in the computer modelling software. The concrete casts taken from inside the six elephant-foot moulds will be stacked up to form a writhing column, two metres tall.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fabric formwork … Bartlett student Zhe Xing works on her concrete space-frame, cast from canvas moulds. Photograph: Zhe Xing/Danli Yu

“We were inspired by termite mounds,” says Jiashuang Sun, a student working on the project, showing me a plaster “endocast” of the negative space inside a computer-modelled termitarium. Just as the termites burrow a complex network of passages to keep their mounds cool, so the clay-spewing robot weaves a matrix of tubes inside the column, which can then be washed out of the cast with a high pressure water-jet, leaving spiralling ventilation tunnels through its centre. The machinery is made from odds and ends hacked together: a Kenwood sausage-maker bolted on to a conventional clay pug mill, with different shaped nozzles 3D-printed or CNC-milled on site – the beauty of having all these different machines together in close proximity.

Next door, another group of students are casting an elegant concrete space-frame structure inside a canvas mould, clamped between plywood frames. The resulting form looks like a kind of bone or a cell structure, seen through an electron microscope, pumped up to a surreal scale. At the other end of the barn, more students fiddle with electronic circuitry that controls a flexible silicone mould with a grid of robotic pistons – a kind of reusable formwork that can be completely altered between each cast, allowing the creation of an infinitely variable wall. They are the products of intensive residencies on the farm (students can stay in the dormitory above the workshop, a CNC-milled treehouse of interlocking beds), produced in between long weeks of planning and modelling back in the school studios. They show the fluency of making that comes with such immersion and ready access to machinery, impossible to achieve in most architecture schools.

Slippery entrance … The Other Room III, one of Guan Lee’s projects on the farm, since filled in. Photograph: Guan Lee

Lee and his collaborator, artist Eleanor Morgan, have just received a £10,000 RIBA research award to continue their work here, with a focus on using the local clay deposits with their robotic dispensers in the quest for site-responsive architecture. They want artists to experiment with everything from individual bricks and ceramics, to the possibility of firing whole buildings in one go, and have plans to convert another barn into a gallery and events space.

“So much 3D-printing just looks ugly and generic, making strange forms for the sake of it,” says Morgan. “We want to look at how it can be relevant to local materials and people, and be used in a more sustainable way.” With the maker movement’s democratisation of technology, they are keen advocates for a future of localised production, increasing access to what has always been the preserve of high-tech industries. “It could be like the village bakery, or the tradition of the village kiln,” she adds. “Maybe one day, everywhere will have a local robot.”

