What
Scale Rule were delighted to be one of an esteemed six-strong shortlist for the London Festival of Architecture! Presenting to the panel was a fantastic experience, and we look forward to seeing the selected piece in 2018.
We have a remit to educate young people and engage local communities; the Modern Maypole Project was a fantastic opportunity to bring local student groups together in a shared endeavour to transform an historic yet sometimes inaccessible part of their city.
We proposed a maypole assembled of many individual components – wooden discs stacked to form a ringed patchwork tower – each component decorated by a primary school from within ten miles of St Mary le Strand, and added to the maypole construction by the students themselves through a lifting ceremony.
The maypole was designed to grow over time, from the base up. The process starts with a decorative top piece, held down to a base plinth by tensioned cable. As each school arrives with their disc, the cables are slackened, the structure jacked up, and the new disc inserted in the at the base of the pole. As schools contribute their discs in a lifting ceremony, the maypole will continue to stretch upwards towards its full height. This will be reached when 130 discs have been stacked, each disc representing one foot of the height of the 17th Century maypole which once stood on the same site.
The final maypole would be a multifaceted post-tensioned wooden masonry structure, bearing the decorative marks of the participating schools, and visibly demonstrating the community assembly process through rings, plinth and cables.
Who
Steve / Phil / Dan / Laura / Annabel
Media
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