Building Knowledge

Keith Moskow knows buildings from the ground up. The award-winning architect and seasonal Chilmark resident got his start working in construction for Martha’s Vineyard builder Herbert Hancock long before embarking on his own career in architecture and design. As the founding partner of Moskow Linn Architecture in Cambridge, he doesn’t need to swing a hammer anymore. But Moskow hasn’t let his practical skills get rusty. 

Instead, he’s passing them on to aspiring architects through an intensive annual workshop called Studio North, which brings college-age students from around the country to design and build one small but useful structure by hand in seven days.

Moskow and his business partner Robert Linn launched the workshop in 2011, when several architecture students created an elegant chicken coop – dubbed the Chicken Chapel – in Vermont. The program moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 2021 when students built a rustic gallery space in Chilmark. 

No matter the setting, students set aside their laptops to learn some decidedly low-tech skills. “We work old-school: pencils, paper, tracing,” said Moskow, whose goal in creating the workshop fifteen years ago was to ensure that at least some future architects and designers understand these fundamental techniques.

“They get hands-on experience, the realization that what you draw can be difficult to build, and the experience of building something that you [helped] design,” Moskow said. These lessons aren’t taught in architecture classes, which rely almost entirely on digital tools, he said. “It’s all computers.”

Beginning with a conceptual design by Linn, the students spend their first day refining the plan and preparing the site, which is usually offered by a private or nonprofit organization. The next five or six days become a controlled frenzy of construction, with a hard deadline looming at the end of the week.

“It’s like speed chess: you have to make decisions very quickly and keep moving, keep moving, keep moving,” Moskow said. “We can’t ponder decisions. We have to come up with a solution and try it. If it doesn’t work, we unscrew it and we try something else.”

Unscrewing, in fact, is such a key element of Studio North that hammers and nails are rarely used and nail guns, never, Moskow said.

After agreeing on the design and materials, the Studio North class makes the first of many trips to E.C. Cottle’s lumberyard. Then they start building, which usually begins with digging holes for the foundation posts. “That’s when I say, ‘This is why you stay in school,’” said Moskow, whose love of a good dad joke coexists with a very serious emphasis on job safety.

Very few of the students have even handled power tools before enrolling in the workshop, he said. That’s a big part of the reason Studio North only takes ten new participants per year.

“More than that and it’s too much to manage – too many fingers,” Moskow said, noting with pride that every one of the more than one hundred participants to date has finished Studio North without injury.

“We have only had splinters, and one pregnancy,” Moskow said, adding that the latter was a pre-existing condition merely discovered during the session. “It’s a one hundred percent good track record [because] we stress safety,” he said.

Besides the practical skills learned, students also make lasting connections. 

“You’re family for the next week,” said Zoe Burkett, an Ohio native who enrolled in Studio North’s 2023 session while she was an undergraduate at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. That summer, the team built a shed known as the Tool Temple at Island Grown Initiative in Vineyard Haven.

Last summer, Burkett came back to the Island to help on the Studio North project, this time as a member of the staff. She worked alongside two earlier workshop graduates who have been part of the team for years: Jonathan Fenton and Kyle Neuman. With these trusted deputies, Moskow said he can step back from constantly supervising each project. “They’re going to take the lead on it. I can just show up and have fun.” 

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Linn and Moskow have been partners for more than twenty years at the firm Moskow founded in 1990. They’re known for designing homes around Martha’s Vineyard and the greater New England area, as well as other meaningful structures, such as the glowing, always-open 9/11 Memorial at Logan International Airport in Boston.

Compared to the bespoke homes in Moskow and Linn’s portfolio, Studio North projects are the humblest of buildings, each created for a practical purpose on a small scrap of land.

That doesn’t mean they’re basic, though. On the Vineyard, Studio North has built a backyard meditation hut that can be disassembled and moved; a shade shelter for farm workers that is mounted on wheels so it can be towed by tractor from field to field; and a rustic gallery for a family’s collection of vintage license plates that also features a window that intentionally frames a nearby tree like a work of art. 

Moskow said landowners who are interested in a Studio North project and willing to underwrite the cost of materials can contact Moskow Linn Architecture through its website. Private and nonprofit organizations have been ideal hosts, he said, because they need the structure and are willing to accept the collaborative design.

“In some situations, people want us, but they want to see what the design is in advance,” he said. That’s a no-go for Studio North, which built its biggest project – a lofted shed nicknamed the Relaxation Station – in 2025 at Milkweed Farm in Chilmark. 

Farm manager Mallory Watts originally envisioned a farmstand, Moskow said, but the tight Studio North timeline doesn’t leave room for a town permitting process that requires advance approval of an evolving design.

“We figure out a lot of things as we go along,” he said.

For instance, Moskow said, if the design calls for planks of one size but Cottle’s lumberyard only happens to have larger or smaller ones in stock, the team has to adjust on the fly and work with what’s at hand, even if it changes the original design.

This flexible approach also accommodates the element of chance. On the Milkweed Farm project, Watts was able to buy used corrugated roofing from someone who salvages scraps on-Island, saving the cost of a shingled roof. The only off-Island purchase, Moskow said, was a high-performance fiberglass solar glazing material used in the window openings.

A year after construction, Watts said the station is still a hit.

The building provides Milkweed Farm employees with plenty of room to store their belongings and do paperwork in the shade. And Watts has added a coffee maker, toaster, and microwave. The deck holds a long table for al fresco meals, and the whole structure is mounted above ground level, extending a platform that already existed at the farm.

“We love it,” she said. “The staff have lunch on the porch, which is really lovely. It’s a nice spot to take a break and sit quietly away from the farm.”

Watts enjoyed watching the project take shape and said the team kept her informed throughout the week. “It was really nice to be around the energy of college students and creative minds,”
she recalled. “They were motivated, and it was exciting to see their vision come
to life.”

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From its chicken-coop beginnings in Vermont, Studio North has grown to become a valuable résumé-builder for young architects and  designers.

Burkett, the former Savannah College of Art and Design student, said that having the 2023 project in her portfolio helped her gain admission to graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin, where she’s now studying architecture.

“Drawings can only show you so much, but this was a real-world project – and we did it in such a short time that it was a conversation piece,” Burkett said. The skills she learned that first summer now help inform her computerized architectural designs, making them more accurate and useful. 

“It’s helpful to understand how things are made. They’re not just lines on a piece of paper,” Burkett said. 

By the end of the week, the students can see that Moskow’s speed-chess metaphor is apt: the clock is always running, and every decision matters. Unlike the quiet intensity of a chess match, though, a Studio North job site has the lively camaraderie of a barn-raising. 

“You bond so quickly, trying to make something at speed,” Burkett said. “You don’t have time to dwell on a problem, so you ask the person next to you.” When things get tricky, there’s always help at hand.

It’s the kind of work Burkett wants to do full-time, once she has earned her master’s degree and her architect’s license. “I would like to take on a job at a firm that holds the same ideas that Keith is doing,” she said. “He has a very practical way of building. He likes to get complicated in some details, but it’s all rooted in something functional and beautiful and made with materials that are local to the area.”

With that ethos in mind, Moskow continues to look for spots of land in need of a hand-built hut, shed, or coop – and a property owner who’s ready to take a leap of faith regarding the design.

“It has to be someone who’s willing to let us just go nuts,” Moskow said.

This article appears in Fall-Winter Home & Garden 2026-2027.