Up up and away

With this absent structure in mind, we have designed a Summer House in-the-round. Standing free with all its sides visible, and conceived as a series of undulating structural bands, it is reminiscent of a blind contour drawing (a drawing executed without lifting the pencil up from the paper and only looking at the subject). The logic of generating a structure from loops is a self-generating one and comes from the idea of coiling material in your hands then stacking the coils upon each other. The horizontal banding recalls the layered coursing of Queen Caroline’s Temple, despite its idiosyncratic nature.

 

The new Summer House is organised as four structural bands, beginning with a bench level attached to the ground, on which is a second band of three C-shaped walls crowned by a third and fourth level that forms a cantilevered roof, a tree-like canopy over the smaller footprint defined by the undulating loops of bench wood. The Summer House is constructed from plywood and timber, materials intrinsically in harmony with the looping geometry of the structure.

Done