Spatial Structures
Design and Build Team: Julien Soosaipillai, Dr Georgios-Spyridon Athanasopoulos, Colin Cresser, Mohammed Fawaz, Dr Tim Ireland, Howard Griffin, Kevin Smith and Hasin Zahin.
The competition brief was to design an innovative lightweight pavilion/structure to stand outside at the venue of the University of Surrey.For this competition requirement, we were initially inspired by Frederick Kiesler's idea of space, which he considered continuous and endless, and that as designers we deal with forces, not objects. Consequently the final structure is inspired by Kiesler's endless house where he expresses concepts such as 'connectivity', 'co-reality', and 'biotechnique' and the notion of continuity - in a form of a line for which both ends meet.
Nature Inspired
Given that biological systems may suggest solutions for technical problems and that a standard optimal solution can be achieved by using different strategies performing optimally under specific circumstances, the proposed design is an expression of natural continuity that blends with the architectural brute force and intentionally strain is explored sequentially in all of its forms (axial, shear, bending, torsion). This combined loading approach as a design decision is achieved through a nature-inspired scheme with imperfections and asymmetries resulting in a structure in state of self-stress.
