Just like orchids in the sun, the life span of the Hovering Orchids! installation was brief – the installation was completed on August 4th and was removed on August 12th. However, while up it shone beautifully and was the welcome centerpiece for the annual Orchid festival at the Queens Botanical Garden. Well done design and build volunteer team (particularly geometry and installation whizz Jeffrey Moser).

We were delighted to bring a new twist (one day workshops!) to the Building the Next Engineers workshops developed in 2022 in partnership with the Structural Engineering Institute Future Fund and Hofstra University. We welcomed 15 participants from the Bloomberg Arts Internship to learn, measure, design and present. We’re looking forward to developing the winning design and getting it installed in August 2024 in line with the Queens Botanical Garden orchid festival!

After an extra-long hibernation following its deconstruction in November 2022, the Hofstra pavilion was reborn at the Queens Botanical Gardens!
The bench is expected to be in place until at least Fall 2024. Go check it out and enjoy – the gardens are a fantastic community experience, and compared to some of the other botanical gardens of the city, unexpectedly vibrant!

A beautiful piece of publishing by Maddie Symons, covering all the great work by the student designers and the team of architects and engineers from Grimshaw and sbp to get [re]fractal built last year. We can’t wait to see one of the limited hard copy print run versions!

A colourful day’s work! We’re so proud of the design and construction team from Grimshaw Architects and sbp, with the help of students from the Fred de Matteis Engineering department at Hofstra University

We are super excited to have watched a team of NYC-based architects and engineers run a great set of concept design workshops with two dozen high-schoolers at Hofstra University this weekend for ‘Building the Next Engineers’. It is great to be able to try out our favo(u)rite hands-on design-build workshop format in a different engineering environment, and even better to do it with such great high school participants, university helpers, and glorious site visit weather.

We had eight great teams with fantastic work, but we also have a winning design to take forward through design development and construction in the fall(autumn). Let’s go!

We at Scale Rule were delighted to see Anthropobscene – Next Generation Design 2020 pavilion take a further step from it’s digital reveal into the real world at COP26 in Glasgow.

Grimshaw Architects (big respect to Mr Andy Watts, in particular), Price and Myers and Sir Robert McAlpine helped deliver the original design by the students at Harris Boys’ Academy East Dulwich expertly, and there is a very nice and informative press-release about it all here.

I couldn’t think of a better concept behind a pavilion at COP26 than one which was so overtly symbolizing the irreversible changes to the planet caused by humans. Ripping apart a big timber representation of the earth with imaginary clawing hands is about as overt as you can really get (beyond torching the pavilion while it is still full of people, or similar…)

After a breakneck speed design development and construction process, everyone was delighted to see the People’s Pavilion up and in action at Here East! We were just delighted to be a small piece of the process with Beyond the Box Consultants and the rest of the team, and very happy to see the completed structure being inspected by the People, and used as a stage.

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Great news, the lecture slides and handouts we used for the pavilion workshop have all been uploaded. Feel free to download and use to run your own similar workshop, and of course, get in touch if you need any help.