Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Wooden gridshell with glass - Gridshell Chiddingstone Orangery

Architect : Peter Hulbert Arquitectos

Client : Chiddingstone Castle

Structural Engeneer : Happold Büro

Wood Structure and Design : Carpenter Oak & Woodland

Glass Structure : IPIG

The grids are usually made of wood built flat on the ground, have nodes fixed with a bar and when they are built, shaped in the form that have been defined in project.
In this case, it is a grid with a cover in glass. Work really challenging because the glass works very different from wood.
The conventional gridshells, are usually conducted by panels of wood too, which guarantees its stability. In this case, as it was glass, the engineers from iPig created a hardware that could be adjusted, locked and support the glass panels, and provide the same movement not to break. 
The result was really a work of engineering, technology and patience. The structure has 12.0m x 5.0m and was built with oak wood. The pieces of wood are 3.0cm x 4.5cm and are composed of 4 members overlap, united by this hardware.

Chidd_33_ready Chidd_beams10_ready Chidd_curves12_ready chiddingstone-1 ChiddMainAssembly_ready Clamp_assembly_2s_ready erection-4-stanchions finished-1 finished-from-above gridshell-chiddingstone node-1 Node_close_up9_ready

designingtheglazingnodes roofandgroundfloorplan