The Art Fund Pavilion Architecture Competition

The objective of The Art Fund Pavilion architecture competition is to provide The Lightbox with a semi-permanent summer pavilion which will sit alongside their RIBA award-winning building by Marks Barfield Architects.

The pavilion will first be shown during the London Design Festival 2009 as part of Tent London and will then travel home to The Lightbox, Woking’s new gallery and museum.
Brief

• Maximum pavilion footprint: 35 square metres, which can be situated in any place within the red lines indicated on the Lightbox Canal courtyard pdf plan. Maximum height: 4 metres.

(See the site)

• Illustrate your design as being used in each of the following 3 scenarios:

As an exhibition space with 8 x A1 size wall-mounted pieces, 6 x plinth-based pieces (500 L x 500 W x 900 H mm) and 4 x floor-standing pieces (1sqm each) allowing space for circulation.

As a formal presentation space for up to 30 persons seated.

As an informal gathering or party space

• Your design must be able to be assembled in 72 hrs and disassembled in 24 hrs.

• The pavilion will be transported and stored, therefore your design should include practical considerations for disassembly and reassembly i.e. stackable components, modularity, longevity.

• Your structure should maximise the inside/outside qualities of a pavilion.

• Include an interior and exterior power and lighting diagram for your pavilion.

This is where the brief gets exciting:

Facit has agreed to support this exciting project by way of engineering, fabricating and installing the winning design. Therefore submissions must be designed to work using their manufacturing and construction techniques.

Facit is an architecture, design and construction company that has developed a new digital method of fabricating intricately designed buildings using computer controlled machines more commonly used in the manufacturing industry.

Download Brief and Application Form

Download a DWG/PDF plan of the site

Before you get started - Read the following simple guidelines to using Facit’s building technique:

1) Think big (but not too big!) - the CNC (computer controlled) machine we use takes a maximum sized sheet of 1220mm x 2440 mm, so no single element can be bigger than this

2) Semi modular (think Lego) - Where you can, use a standard width for components of 600mm wide by 2400mm– this will mean the least amount of waste (save those trees!)

3) Wood is Good -The timber we use is 18mm Structural FSC certified Graded Spruce Ply. It also comes in 24mm thickness.

4) We use Finn Forrest I joists for long spans where needed.

5) We like curves which we make by scoring lines on one side, but only in 1 direction and radius not smaller than 900mm (as the wood has limits)

6) Smaller rather than larger elements please! – any module that is made up of more than 2 full sheets of material gets heavy and difficult to manhandle.

7) 3D – the shortlisted will need to provide a 3D computer model. Don’t worry about having every single drawing/ component worked out, we will help with that later.

8) Keep it clean – no glues please, we prefer to use screws, bolts or wooden pegs.

9) Go for it! We like the good stuff.

Official Website