‘Big Shed’ Assembly Workshop
The Assembly Workshop was designed by students of Design & Make and Diploma Unit 19, with support from engineers Atelier One and architects Mitchell Taylor Workshop. It provides a large enclosed workspace for fabrication, assembly and prototyping activities at Hooke Park. The building is constructed from larch sourced from Hooke Park and local woodlands, and uses innovative screw connections to form the roundwood trusses.
Technical Details
The building structure, engineered by consultants Atelier One, has pioneered the use of high-capacity screwed connections within large round-wood trusses. Developed through an experimental testing collaboration with Bath University, this approach allows trees to be used in the round; in complex structures without the need for major engineering processing. It demonstrates an approach to building that maximises the use of local resources and minimises reliance on industrial production of building components.
Un-regularised larch roundwood was used for the primary structure. Larch was chosen for its good durability and current availability due to recent surgical felling to prevent the spread of phytophthra in South West England. The wall panelsare clad using western red cedar planking (typically 30mm thick and 100mm wide), sawn from about 30 trees felled at Hooke Park. The planks are carried on triangular “cassettes” with a sawn larch substructure.
The fabrication of the trusses was carried out by a team which consisted of students both from Design & Make and summer volunteers on the AA’s SummerBuild programme at Hooke Park, who worked alongside experienced timber framers led by Charley Brentnall. Each of the planar trusses was fabricated and assembled horizontally, before all being lifted into position on the building’s concrete slab. Similarly, the cladding cassettes were assembled flat and then lifted into place.
The majority of the truss connections use sets of Heco Topix screws, up to 400mm long, at cross-angles through each joint. The angle of each screw had to be defined in a way that correctly related to the force direction and the timber grain (the screws need to be oblique to the radial axis of the tree to prevent splitting).
Another complexity was in how to best match the naturally varying trees trunk to the differing structural performance requirements within the structure. By mapping the engineer’s analysis-derived forces onto the structure, the natural variations in diameter, taper, straightness and quality (measured by the number and size of knots) were taken into account so that each tree is optimally used in the building.
Project Credits
Students: Nozomi Nakabayashi (Design + Make); Elena Gaider, Eyal Shaviv, Olivia Putihrai, Samuel Nelson, Sanem Alper (Diploma Unit 19)
Teaching Team: Martin Self (Program Director); Piers Taylor, Kate Darby (Studio Tutors); Charley Brentnall (Make Tutor)
Executive Architect: Mitchell Taylor Workshop (Piers Taylor, Luke Holcombe)
Structural Engineer: Atelier One (Aran Chadwick, Luis Fernandez, Elizabeth Bismut, Eva MacNamara)
Civil Engineer: Buro Happold (Bob Riley, Joseph Walton)
Timber Testing: Bath University (Prof Richard Harris, Nick Gathercole)
Contractor: Charley Brentnall