Belsay Sitooterie Can a building stand on the architectural equivalent of matchsticks? ENGLISH HERITAGE APPROACHED THE STUDIO to build a pavilion at Belsay Hall in Northumberland, one of twelve temporary ‘sitooteries’, a Scottish term for a garden structure in which to ‘sit oot’. Folly, gazebo and sitooterie form a category of buildings thar fascinated well-to-do Victorians, who had these special structures built in the grounds of their country homes. It was a surprising commission to ‘come from an organization better known for conserving old buildings than creating Although the budget for each sitooterie was small, it was an opportunity for the studio to try out an unbuilt idea for @ hairy building (pages 144-147), as well as exploring a different way of making a building structure. An individual bristle of a scrubbing brush has little strength, but a whole brush is remarkably strong when you push down, on it, Could we make a building stand on the architectural equivalent of bristles, a multiplication of single, delicate struc- tural elements? New buildings are generally smooth boxes, but this project experimented with the silhouette of a building against the sky. How far was it possible to splice building and sky together and blur the edges of a building? It was an exploration of texture on an architec- tural scale ~ taking a box, applying a texture to it and magnifying that texture to a point where it changes your perception of the form. We also felt that large building objects tended to be flat and textureless, their interest spread thinly over their form; yet smaller objects, like jewellery or clothing, often exhibit a rich concentration of detail. Could we apply this level of intricacy on an architec ‘ural scale? ‘The building is a cube with hairs embedded in every surface, like hundreds of thin legs, holding it raised above the ground. Individually, each leg is delicate and easily snapped in two, but together the legs combine to carry the weight of the structure. ‘The Sitooterie consists of a steel and plywood box, 2.4 metres square, perforated with 5,100 holes, with I-metre long, ash wood staves fixed into each one, The staves project perpendicularly from every face of the central box, but IstNy te AMMAN S ; MMA VSSradiate around the corners, The rounded ends of the staves protrude slightly into the box, giving the interior a dotted texture, like tactile paving. Some are allowed. to protrude further into the space to support seating. The Sitooterie was in place throughout the summer, when Belsay Hall received record numbers of visitors, and was dismantled in the autumn, 1532.0 Yorkshire Sound Barrier What is the large-scale equivalent of an egg box? ‘THE STUDIO ENTERED a competition to design a 2-kilometre-long sound barrier for a motorway in the north of England, to dampen the impact of traffic noise on a nearby residential area. Knowing that music recording studios sometimes had ‘egg boxes glued to their walls to dampen the sound, we decided to replicate the geometry and acoustic performance of this surface on an architectural scale, using the iconic orange plastic traffic cone. We proposed a 4-metre-high wall, 2 kilometres long, consisting of 32,000 cones mounted on a simple steel frame. ‘The barrier would be economical to build because its main ingredient was ‘a cheap, ready-made component. rs gl ae 19829 Stratford Olympic Sculpture How can water be used to power a fifteen-storey-high mechanism? PART OF THE PEDESTRIAN ROUTE into the Olympic Park at Stratford, in east London, passes through a new shopping centre, with many thousands of people due to come through this centre on their way to the Olympic Games. ‘A competition was held for the design of a landmark, te be located at a point at which two routes converged and then went off in a third direction, towards the Olympic site. The competition brief asked for two elements ~ a sculpture and a water feature — and suggested that some kind of vertical marker was required. In order to avoid obstructing the flow of pedestrians, we ruled out the possibility of big pools of water and decided to combine the water element and the sculpture into a single structure. We wondered whether we could make a connection between a notional so-metre-high vertical clement, placed at the inter= section of the incoming routes, and the 50 metres of horizontal space in front of it, pointing towards the Olympic site. Our proposal was a giant version of the water feature that is sometimes seen in Japanese gardens, which fills with water, then tips over and empties itself, coming back up as its centre of gravity shifts. Fifty metres high, our structure would gradually fill with water until, with a stately movement, it pivoted down to a horizontal position, emptying itself of water on 9 spot on the ground so metres away from where it began. Then, using gravity, it would slowly rise back to a vertical position to begin filling with water again. With no mechanical assistance, the weight of the water alone moves a structure that weighs many tonnes. In its upright state, it might be mistaken for a contemporary sculpture, but the power of this massive object would be in the unexpectedness of its automaton-like movement, on a vast scale. We envis- aged people gathering next to it while the structure filled with water, waiting to witness the drama of its tipping over and pouring out its water. In our workshop we built a working model that used real water, which showed not only that the idea could work but also how a dampener could be put on it to prevent the structure moving down too fast and splashing water 490everywhere. The finished project would have been made in steel sections by the steelwork fabricator that had constructed the East Beach Café in Littlehampton, with glass panels set into it that allowed you to see it filling up with water, 492xe Centrifugal Chandelier How can you make a real virtual object? WHEN VISITING RELATIVES in Argentina at the age of fourteen, I was taken to a remote cattle ranch, where I met an elderly - gaucho who, in his youth, had brought down running cattle with an implement called a boleadora, which consists of three heavy balls connected with ropes. The gaucho swings it around his head and then lets it fly at the cattle, tangling the ropes around their legs. As they spin, the balls seem to draw a circle in the ai. Because the human eye perceives a bright light moving through a dark space as an illuminated trail, like drawing in the air with a sparkler on Bonfire Night, we experimented in the studio many years later with swinging multiple points of light. If your eye reads these as rings of light, perhaps spinning lights could be used to describe a three-dimensional, rotational form in en the profile the air, such as a sphere, cylinder or hourglass, or e of somebody's face. The proposal is for a vertical spinning rod that is initially straight and life- less. Beginning to spin, it becomes centrifugally orbited by points of light on wires that move in and out of the rod, drawing constantly changing, rotational forms in the air. Powered by an electric motor, the spinning tube contains stacked reels of fibre optic cables, individually controlled to reel in and out their corre~ sponding points of light, 494