High street architecture

Tonkin Liu were commissioned by Austin Reed to produce a piece of art-cum-architecture to sit on display in one of its flagship stores. This is one of the earlier tonkin liu projects to incorporate shell lace structure, a technique developed by themselves and Ed Clarke of Arup through research and experimentation with digital modeling, digital analysis, and digital fabrication tools. The design process is intuitive, analytical and iterative.

Three-dimensional geometries are built up virtually from conjoined developable surfaces. These surfaces are unzipped at the seams, unrolled and nested allowing efficient laser cutting from a flat sheet material. The cut profiles are reassembled to create the final three-dimensional form.

Made using lightweight card. Problems finding suppliers of card large enough to laser cut the shapes in one piece led to splitting parts. This in turn, required developing a new joining system which would not hinder the structural concept of the piece.

Once the parts were cut and re-assembled around jigs, they were glued in place. As more pieces were connected the stronger and stiffer the structure became.

This project proved you could make very large lightweight structures that are incredible strong.

- photography by sue barr