Awkward to recover after manually deleting workspace dir

If I do this:

bst workspace open myelement.bst ../myelement
rm -rf ../myelement

I can't use bst to close the workspace:

bst workspace close myelement.bst
Loading:   020
Resolving: 020/020
Error loading pipeline: Failed loading workspace. Did you remove the workspace directory? [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/src/myelement'

To recover, I can mkdir ../myelement, and then close the workspace. It feels a bit awkward to have to do so though, I simply want to remove it :)