How we designed the mobile orchard - by Alex Haw of Atmos
The director of architecture practice Atmos on creating an interactive 'mobile orchard', which Haw presented at this year's Fabricate 2014 conference in Zurich
Words by Alex Haw of Atmos
Trees are constantly hovering in the consciousness of any architect. They're both our nemesis - how the hell do they do that? we wonder - and our saviour - the camouflage we plant when buildings go wrong.
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Picture: © Alex Haw
It was a bizarre, thrilling, and scary commission to be asked to design an orchard of trees. Though a lot of our work at Atmos seems to be tree-like (we even have projects named things like Floating Forest, Rootscape, The Bougheries and Arboreal Lightning), I realised that we knew relatively little about the biology of trees. So we began an intense period of research into their typologies and growth patterns.
Picture: © Alex Haw
We began to splice together various arboreal genes in the design of a new type of artificial, inhabitable tree - one that grew from natural principles to serve human needs, sating the fantasy of a tree that fitted the body like a glove, and that you could climb safely.
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Picture: © Alex Haw
We endowed it with sprawling street-furniture roots and spiralling branches that radiated to offer a concealed stairway that leads past various seating niches to a sky-throne. Its limbs offered real apples for hungry mouths, and a scatter of waste-less 'London leaves' - tiled components laser-cut in the shape of the surrounding boroughs.
Picture: © Alex Haw
The project was grown digitally from a series of models and scripts, and then sliced into routed layers of glued and bolted plywood, and assembled together as slices tensioned into hidden tree rings. Its long, removable branches (necessary for nomadic logistics) were secured with a single nut and extended bolt, over which we lapped our luminous xylem - strips of automated, pre-programmed lighting that joined the pulse of electronic life defining the surrounding City's financial networks.
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Picture: © Alex Haw
We were delighted to recently present the process through which we digitally designed and fabricated the Mobile Orchard at the impressive Fabricate Conference, at ETH Zurich.
