Future by design X Cove park

Cove park was awarded the British Council Architecture, Design, Fashion’s Future By Design award which was designed to inspire a global dialogue around climate change, which coincided with Glasgow hosting COP26. The award recognised that young architects would spend most of their careers responding to the climate crisis, therefore they would need new materials, design strategies and ways of working.

The chosen idea was to create an outdoor classroom made from a 3D curvilinear gridshell structure and to furnish it with pieces created from mycelium and agro-waste. This was to highlight the power of timber technology in the time of the climate crisis and how bio-materials can help us get to a zero carbon future

The project ended up winning the Scottish Design Award for a low cost architecture project: https://www.scottishdesignawards.com/2022/architecture-low-cost-project-schemes-under-200k/future-by-design/index.html

Timeline

4 months (June to September 2021)

Group members

Approx 20 including: professional architects and engineers, landscape architects, botanists and students.

My role

To help design exterior architecture of the gridshell and the mycelium structures, as well as the final creation of the structure.

Skills

Teamwork, rapid prototyping, wood working, structural engineering, distance collaborative work on Zoom

Software

Miro, fusion 360, SketchUp

Design constraints

To create a meaningful structure that resonated with the landscape using innovative, low carbon materials

To re-use the carbon embodied in existing structures by including the pre-existing four concrete lines in our solution

The structure was situated on a part of the landscape that was very open to the weather on Scotland’s west coast and the animals from the neighbouring farms would come into the field.

Research

Site visit

Experimenting with a life size model of the gridshell to check how viable it was.

Creation of different gridshell shapes and presenting them to the group.

Ideation

Many open and flexible structures were considered, so they would be less affected by the wind.

The idea of the strong outer gridshell was favoured by the engineers as they deemed it to be the most successful structure.

Final design

This was a collaborative effort between my idea for a skewed cross shape and one of the architects for an egg shell like back. Both features were combined resulting in the final shape and different ways of furnishing the insides were experimented with.