Finally the day has arrived where the process of moving the design structure from the workshop to the site needs to be initiated. As the first step, the students started digging the foundation for the structure. Since its been decided to not use any concrete in the design, the foundation needs to be a lot deeper to achieve the required stability of the structure. Now, the students are required to excavate upto to a depth of 1m, where the legs of the verticals will later be placed.
Apart from the shovels, the students used a jackhammer for the excavation, an equipment they were recently introduced to.
While the work was on at the site, the remaining students were working on multiple other tasks.
Students were continuing the work on the finishing of the structural members which included – removing sharp branches, smoothing out of sharp edges, sanding and finally treating the wood with 3 layers of sealant for insect, water and sun protection.
Other team members were picking out smaller pieces of wooden trunks to be incorporated and used as horizontal members in the design.
A total of 12 trunks of approximately 5m length have been selected. They are now in the process of being debarked and treated just like the larger vertical members and the dragon head.
Towards the end of the day, the students at the excavation site came across an unexpected problem. While digging they ran into some pre-existing reinforced concrete construction. This meant that they could no longer use the marked location as a foundation for one of the vertical members. Maintaining their calm, the students quickly started working on a modification of the design to overcome this problem.
It will be interesting to see the solution that the students come up with to successfully overcome this challenge.
“M01 : Raw Nature | Design and Construction with Unaltered Forest Trees” is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia
Developed at the Masters in Advanced Ecological Buildings in 2019-2020 by:
Students: Alexander Hadley, Anfisa Mischenko, Ay?e Sena Kocao?lu, Camille Julienne Garnier Mc Cormick, Dania Aburouss, Ester Camps Bastida, Filippo Vegezzi, Giada Mirizzi, Irene Rodriguez Perez, Juan Gabriel Secondo, Maitri Joy Uka, Camila Fajardo, Nathalie Botbol, Rafael Abboud, Shreya Sharma, Yue Zhang, Zhiqian Liu
Faculty: Daria Bychkova and Michael Salka
29.10.2019