Train of Thought : Through Making



From our March 2025 Newsletter


As we contemplate a workshop where we’ve been asked to build a simple chair with a group of 3 and 4 year-olds, we are compelled to contemplate the complicated (and often messy) benefits of learning through making.


Being a contemporary architecture practice, we often feel the inherent separation of the act of design from the process of making buildings. We spend hours contemplating and resolving the ways in which we think spaces will come together – relying on our own knowledge and the knowledge of the experts around us, past experiences and grounded assumptions where necessary.

This is why the time when a project is on-site can be the most rewarding, but also the most challenging. It is the space where we confront these assumptions and develop new understandings about the process of making.



Having spent some time constructing simpler parts of a few of our own architectural designs, it’s always interesting how many blind spots you encounter on the path between the page and the completed project, no matter how well you think you’ve thought things through. It might be something simple like what the weight of a sheet of plasterboard actually feels like, or needing to actually be able to fit the drill in there somehow (!) – but quite often it’s something profound, a realisation about the reason things are always made a certain way.

We found this same experience over again when putting together the different pieces of Replica Autoprogettazione. Each sculptural object was meticulously planned on paper, with detailed drawings forming part of the exhibition and schedules of parts required by the material sponsors. We felt we had developed a much deeper appreciation for each of the systems used before even starting the construction process for the chairs. This time the process of making went extremely smoothly – sometimes it’s a nice surprise how closely a physical prototype follows its digital predecessor.


Drawing extract for our Replica Zig-Zag Chair from Replica Autoprogettazione

Even still, our hands continued to teach us more, every step of the way, long after the designs were finished the process of making was one of discovery.


Process photo from the making of our Replica Zig-Zag Chair - Angle grinder on cable tray


A depth of understanding can be conveyed when this process of discovery through making is used as a tool for teaching by a deft hand. We have found this compelling depth in Enzo Mari’s ‘Proposta Per Un’Autoprogettazione’ – pages of designs where epiphany meets the arc of a hammer finding a nail.


The ‘Sedia Q’ by Enzo Mari featured in our Replica Autoprogettazione exhibition


Each object is a household item of furniture made simply from timber boards, a hammer and nails; it is also a beautiful puzzle that unfolds for you with every correct step and subtly nods towards the other end of the hammer with every time you stray too far from this path.


Photo from our workshop ‘a workshop for the building of a chair by the person who will use it’

We’ve found great joy in working through these designs of Mari, so much so that we developed adapted versions of the three chairs from the series – scaled down in size for different aged children, using readily available Australian DAR timber sections.


‘Sedia Q’ by Enzo Mari alongside our ‘Sedia R for a 3-Year-Old’ from ‘AS 1123.0 Autoprogettazione - Part 1: Chairs For Children’

We did this in the hope of making these ‘self-projects’ more accessible to a wider group of people, lowering the barrier of entry and creating a new way of engaging with the project. So, when the opportunity arose to share something this important with a group of smaller hands, to help them see how something is made, we picked up our hammer and saw.




-Michelle & Stephen

On Second Thought


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