The London Design Festival has worked closely with the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) for several years on creative projects, resulting in successful collaborations such as Timber Wave, Endless Stair and The Wish List, all exhibiting the versatility and potential of sustainable timbers.
This year AHEC, award-winning firm Alison Brooks Architects, Arup, Merk and the London Design Festival collaborate to create a new installation, The Smile.
Alison Brooks has designed an urban installation for this year’s London Design Festival that showcases the structural and spatial potential of cross–laminated hardwood, using American tulipwood. The Smile is a structure that can be inhabited and explored, and which offers a new way of looking at the city.
Using construction sized panels of hardwood CLT for the first time, Alison Brooks’ concept is of a 3.5m high and 36m long curved rectangular tube - a very pure and efficient structural form, and the first ever mega-tube made of timber.
The timber tube is curved into a long upside down arc – hence its name – which, like a wheel, only touches the ground at one point. The, curved form allows the Smile to cantilever out from its centre point to reach out into space. The cantilevers hover above the ground, creating sheltered outdoor spaces. Each end of the tube is open to the air; cinematic apertures that offer balcony views to the landscape. At night these apertures will project light from each end, creating an endless smile.
The curved floor, curved ceiling and curved walls create a dynamic and unfamiliar internal space. It is an undulating environment, something between a landscape, an adventure playground, a bridge and a diving board.
Arup’s engineering team are working with us to derive the most efficient structural form, using only 80 cubic metres of wood to create a 180 square metre space.
The forces of tension and compression working in the timber CLT walls will be expressed by perforations in its elevations. These will generate patterns of light across the Smile’s interior spaces during the day, to become an urban lantern at night.
“AHEC, in collaboration with ARUP, has been on a 10 year journey of exploration, innovation and research to prove that hardwoods have a role to play in the timber construction revolution," said David Venables, European Director of the American Hardwood Export Council.
"All our previous Festival projects – Timber Wave, Endless Stair and Wish List – have been significant projects. The Smile is important because it will create the first-ever use of industrial-sized panels of hardwood CLT (cross laminated timber). This is the creation of a brand-new product and a new use of hardwood that could transform the way architects and engineers approach timber construction.”
