London borough London Borough of Camden | ||
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Similar Bedford Square, Bloomsbury Theatre, Russell Square, Freud Museum London, Dominion Theatre | ||
The DRL10 Pavilion is the winning entry in the ‘AADRLTen’ Pavilion competition held in 2007. It is an advanced technology concrete structure that was erected in Bedford Square, London in front of the Architectural Association School of Architecture and opened to the public on 13 March 2008 as part of the AADRL10 Exhibition and Publication celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Architectural Association's acclaimed Design Research Laboratory. The structure was designed and developed by Alan Dempsey and Alvin Huang with Adams Kara Taylor and members of the AADRL.
The pavilion is formed by a discontinuous shell structure spanning over 10m made of thin fibre reinforced concrete elements which perform as structure and skin, floor walls and furniture. The concrete is manufactured by the Austrian company Rieder, and the design of the pavilion takes the material to new technical limits, which required extensive prototyping and material testing during the design development process. The jointing of discrete concrete profiles exploits the tensile strength of Fibre-C and a simple intersecting notch joint which is locked together using a bespoke rubber gasket assembly. The angle of intersection at each joint continuously varies across the structure.
The entire design process was conducted using 3D digital and physical modelling, and the design development was completed using rigorous constraint modelling and scripting to control over 850 individually different profiles and 2000 joints. Finally, the elements were manufactured directly from digital models on CNC cutting equipment using standard sized 13mm thick flat sheets of Fibre-C concrete and 15mm thick mild steel plate.