I often write about abstract concepts such as unrecognised buildings or philosophical issues of design but what’s kept us busy the last few weeks is what we are actually about and what we really care about, not politics, not funding issues but day to day debate on the small details of a project which eventually develop and grow to make a satisfying whole.

We are designing a relatively small temporary timber pavilion shaped like a sliced doughnut and made up of an open doubly curved hexagonal grid. Three of the pavilions can either be joined together to make a super pavilion or just displayed singly. The timber is an environmentally modified wood from Norway called Kebony for which limited information on structural performance is available. The joints between the hexagons have to be invisible and to be of the visual quality of a piece of furniture and the pavilion has to be built from a small kit of parts and demounted in days not weeks.

Nothing unusual so far but we’ve been fortunate in that we’ve had a far deeper role than the norm and had a large hand in using digital tools and common sense in determining the overall geometry in order to keep the overall form as structurally efficient as possible, spent weeks in figuring out the configuration of the joints and then spending even more weekends in detailing how they fix together ( We can recommend the Screwfix catalogue, child’s high chairs and flat pack furniture for inspiration). The next step is to use our contacts to test samples of the joints in a university lab to see how strong they are. In between, we’ve introduced the Architect to material suppliers and debated the pattern or rhythm of timber members in relation to a fabric membrane within the space. The deadline is a fully operational structure summer 2012 in time for a tour around London so it’s a fairly intensive programme.

What’s unusual about this project is that is an interesting opportunity to design something from the smallest detail upwards and to consider the object from the perspective of it being a small scale tactile furniture like construct rather than an inhumane scale structure. So apologies for not having written a blog post for some time but frankly we’ve been having some fun with this.

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