Five years on from the groundbreaking gridshell workshops at the Weald and Downland open air museum in Sussex, fans of gridshell buildings will be thrilled to see the new Saville Gardens gridshell in Windsor Great Park (Gold Award winner of The Wood Awards 2006). Oliver Lowenstein introduces the history of the concept and discusses this latest achievement ..
This is a six page article. First published in December 2006
Extract:
In the early nineties the German engineer-architect, Frei Otto, visited Dorset in South West England. Otto had been invited by the furniture maker and entrepreneur, John Makepeace, to participate in a wood build experiment which aimed to revitalise the use of roundwood thinnings, or wastewood. The result was the main furniture and crafts workshop at Hooke Park, the forest-based teaching and learning addition to Makepeace’s Parnham House Furniture School, down the road in the small and picturesque village of Beaminster. It was, as it turned out, Otto’s only project in this country. Back in Germany, Otto’s reputation remains formidable to this day. Some of this has to do with Munich’s 1972 Olympic stadium, which he designed and which is still, apparently, many a German citizen’s favourite piece of modern architecture. Among the wood architectural fraternity he is best known, however, for the Mannheim Multihall, an extraordinary organic labyrinth of curving timber lattices, combining a series of pod-like snake-skin walk-through entrances and exits, and encompassing two open space halls. The building was originally designed as a temporary structure for a flower festival. The structural engineering technique Otto developed for Mannheim he called gridshells. Again, despite its success, Mannheim is the only gridshell Otto actually completed.
VAT applies to this product (UK only).
