68 | Sector Focus: Timber in Construction
BIO-BASED BUILDING
SERPENTINE SHOWCASE FOR
Wood was the natural material for the architect to turn to for this year’s London summer arts venue. Mike Jeffree reports
Below: A temporary Pavilion has been
built by Serpentine Galleries for the last 22 years
Bottom:
A feature of the interior is a concentric table along the perimeter
IMAGES:
SERPENTINE PAVILION 2023 DESIGNED BY LINA GHOTMEH. © LINA GHOTMEH
ARCHITECTURE. PHOTO: IWAN BAAN, COURTESY: SERPENTINE
The Serpentine Pavilion is an event space in London’s Kensington Gardens that comes and goes with the summer. But in its short stay it attracts thousands of people and generates international media coverage. It’s a combined gallery, a venue for artistic conversation and performance and a place to just sit, eat and contemplate. The Pavilion itself is part of the attraction for visitors, for many the star turn. Over the 22 years it’s been built, it’s gained a reputation for ground-breaking design – a showcase for architecture at the cutting edge which reinterprets construction materials and pushes their technical boundaries. And this
year it’s very much a showcase for doing that with wood.
The roll call of designers who’ve taken on
the Pavilion challenge in the last two decades reads like a who’s who of top rank architects worldwide. Among the big names have been Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito and Oscar Niemeyer.
This year’s building is the creation of French-Lebanese Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh and she’s called it À table – the French call to people to sit down together “around the table to engage and participate in dialogue about current affairs, politics, personal lives and dreams while sharing a meal”. A feature of the interior is a concentric table along the perimeter, which is an invitation from the architect to visitors “to convene, sit down, share and celebrate exchanges that enable new relationships to form”.
Ms Ghotmeh has built a reputation for focusing on sustainability and designing spaces “that are conceived in dialogue with their surrounding natural environment”. This is very much the approach for À table. The 300m2
, 4.4m-high building features
a structural frame of glulam (GL 30 H) columns and rafters with a central steel supporting ring beam forming an oculus, a circular opening at the apex of the roof. The roof deck is made of plywood sheets with a liquid applied membrane covering on the top surface for weatherproofing. This is supported on plywood purlins spanning between the glulam rafters. The oculus roof covering has a central steel support with a pre-stressed ETFE membrane cover.
Fretted plywood panels sit between the structural columns to form the external façade of the building.
All plywood and glulam surfaces are stained for exterior use and treated with fire retardant, and connections between primary structural elements are principally screw and bolt.
The lightweight structure sits on concrete pad foundations, which are designed to be
TTJ | July/August 2023 |
www.ttjonline.com
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