Construction to showcase graduates work at the Faculty of Arts Graduate Show 2012 - Up and Beyond.
15 Aug 2013
Architecture and Interior Architecture students have been busy building a pavilion in the faculty's quadrangle to showcase their design projects, at the Faculty of Arts Graduate Show 2012 - Up and Beyond.
The eco-friendly pavilion will be made of curved timber and the students have been researching how best to bend continuous lengths of wood to create the structure.
Lecturer Kate Cheyne said: “We are using green wood to coerce a shape into it whilst it is still flexible from being freshly cut. Currently green timber is relatively untested for use in construction as most building and furniture projects prefer the stability of dried timber. Our pavilion’s final shape and design is evolving in response to what we are learning in our experiments.”
Over the Easter holiday, a group of students and tutors spent a week in local woodlands experimenting with different methods of bending green, coppiced timber. They teamed up with David Saunders of the Woodland Enterprise Ltd who was interested in working with them to innovate in finding uses for UK timber species from woodland managed by coppicing. Kate said: “David provided them with his own personal 20 acres of woodland holding a variety of species from both ancient and newly planted stocks. Idyllic with its bed of bluebells under the blossoming canopy, it is home to badgers, fallow deer and songbirds and became an outdoor workshop and campsite for the week.”
“Birch wood was of interest to us all as it is considered a weed in the woodlands and currently has little value beyond firewood. To find a use for it would be exciting.”
“Spring is the most promising time to work with green timber as the sap is rising in the trees and the wood is at its most flexible. The aim was to set the trees into the desired curve and then leave them to dry out so retaining the memory of this shape when later taken out of the jig. By placing the memory of the curve into the wood it would greatly reduce the forces put on it, so making it more manageable to work with structurally.”
Having played with different ways to increase and control the curve of the timber, students and tutors are now re-designing the pavilion on the back of what they learnt over the Easter holiday. The finished pavilion will be completed for the opening night of the graduate show on 9 June.
The pavilion is also featured as an open event as part of Royal Institute of British Architects Love Architecture Festival 2012.
The Architecture and Interior Architecture staff and students would like to thank the below contributors, who have all donated to the pavilion project for 2012:
