The plan is flat.
Moss & Form
- Project
- Botanical architecture & interiors
- Sheet
- A-101 — Site plan & section, current work
- Drawing
- Hover a zone. The plan builds itself.
A-201Current work
We are not stylists and we are not gardeners. We are a small studio that draws sections for a living, and we have never once been asked to choose between light and a plant.
Scale 1:200 · A1 · rev C
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Ryegrass Pavilion
01 — Bristol Botanic Garden, Bristol · 2023 · 340 m²
A propagation hall and reading room for a botanic garden that had run out of room for its own overflow. The bays are spaced to the vigour of ryegrass rather than to a standard module, which means the building is slightly wrong from the first drawing and stays slightly wrong — usefully so.
The grass is allowed to run to seed through the reading room in July. Visitors complain, then do not.
Specified
Fig. 1 — South elevation, 1:200 -
The Understory
02 — Selkirk Forest, Scottish Borders · 2022 · 118 m²
A reading room for twelve people, built inside a retained beech stand and built so that nothing had to be cut. Every structural decision was made by drawing the canopy in section and then drawing the room underneath it, which is a slower way to work and the only one that produced a building nobody wanted to demolish.
Twenty-two mature beeches. One reading room. The argument took two years and four hearings.
Specified
Fig. 2 — Cross section, 1:100 -
Seed Vault Annex
03 — Uppsala, Sweden · 2024 · 1,940 m²
A cold store and germination laboratory added to a 1970s seed vault, held at −18 °C for eleven months of the year. The hard problem was never the cold: it was that cold rooms are windowless and people still have to work in them, so the entire north flank is given over to a deep planted lightwell that borrows its daylight from the laboratory at the other end.
Moss on the north wall. Not decoration — a humidity buffer that keeps the lime from dusting.
Specified
Fig. 3 — West elevation, 1:300
Sheet A-201 · three current buildings · site plans and elevations
Three buildings, each one grown from what was already there
A-301Construction sequence
Drag the marker. The assembly builds in the order it will actually be built, which is the only order worth designing for.
Stages 1–7 · 1:100
Stage 1 of 7 — Site survey Setting out, tree survey, soil and hydrology. Two weeks on site before anything is drawn.
Sheet A-301 · setting out to completion · seven stages
Every building we draw, we also draw coming up out of the ground
A-401Daylight study
Take the handle across the sky. The beam is a real one — the aperture is 2.4 m and the sill 800 mm — so the floor is usable for roughly four hours a day in December. That number is the whole design.
21 December · 52.4° N
- Time
- 12:00
- Altitude
- 41°
- Penumbra reached
- 2.9 m
- Notes
- Sun crosses the reading table.
Sheet A-401 · aperture 2.4 m · sill 800 mm
We sell the hour, not the room
A-501Practice & notes
Nine of us, one drawing office above a joinery in Shropshire, and a lightbox that has been re-tubed twice. Everything on this plate was drawn before it was built, at least once, on paper.
Studio record · Corvedale Mill
Register 1 — How the work is done
We draw in section first
A plan tells you where furniture goes. A section tells you whether anyone will still want to be in the room in February. Every project here starts as a hand-drawn section at 1:100, on paper, before anyone opens a computer.
Plants are structure, not softscape
We model a canopy before we model a roof. Where a mature tree must be retained, the building is drawn around its root plate and its drip line, and the foundations are designed to bridge rather than trench. This is slower. It is also the only reason these buildings still stand.
Five materials, and a limit
Stone, timber, glass, moss and concrete. Not a limitation — a discipline. A room built from five materials can be repaired by five people with a van, and it will look better in eighty years than it does now.
- Founded
- 2014
- People
- 9
- Live sites
- 6
- Retained trees
- 61
- Drawings by hand
- 100%
Register 2 — Notes from the studio wall
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On moss, and when not to use it
Note 14 · March
We get asked for moss walls about once a year, and we say no most of the time. Moss is a humidity buffer, a carbon store and an excellent thing to look at in a shaded, damp room. It is not a finish. Specify it on the north flank of a cold store and nowhere else.
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Planting is a structure
Note 13 · January
A beech is not furniture. It is a column with a schedule of maintenance, a root plate with a radius, and a fifty-year opinion about your roof. Draw it at 1:100 with the same care you give a steel section.
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Why we still draw sections by hand
Note 12 · November
Because a hand does not let you check and un-check without noticing. Nine of us, one drawing office above a joinery in Shropshire, and a lightbox that has been re-tubed twice.
Sheet A-501 · registers 1 and 2 · studio record
A studio of nine, a sawmill we do not own, and a rule about drawings
A-601Enquiries
We take on six projects a year and turn down rather more than we accept. Early conversations are free and usually involve standing in a field.
Six commissions · 2026
Corvedale Mill, Shropshire
SY8 4AA
Moss & Form Ltd · RIBA Chartered Practice · Registered in England 09044127
Sheet A-601 · bring a site · we will walk it