Generation Pop-up – A Tree Come True

What

Architecture and engineering workshop (2 days)
Pavilion construction (2 days)

The 2-day workshop, held at the City Centre, was a mix of short talks from professionals about architecture and engineering, and design workshops to put what was learned into action. In teams of 2-5 the students came up with a design for an installation in the heart of Broadgate, London,

Students were taken through the whole design process from creating concept sketches and models, producing detailed drawings and explaining how their design would built! During the afternoon of the second workshop day each team presented their design to a panel of friendly architects and engineers from academia and industry, featuring Caroline Cole, founder of Colander; Peter Murray, Chairman of NLA; Ben O’Connor, Director of the City Centre; and Sinead Conneely, Director of Scale Rule.

The brief for this project challenged students to:

Create an installation that encourages conversations about isolation and loneliness
Cover an area of up to 30m², and a volume up to 4m high
Last for up to 6 months
It should be accessible and available to all
It should be demountable, and usable in segments in the future
It should aim to reuse waste construction material in innovative ways
It should have both grand structural gestures, and finer architectural details

The winning design was then developed by the Scale Rule team, for construction with the students. You can read all about the project here!

Generation Pop-up is being completed in partnership with The City Centre, New London Architecture, and Broadgate. It follows on from previous Scale Rule design-build workshops in London, Birmingham and Nottingham completed 2015-2018.

Construction

It was rainy. But we did it, thanks to indefatigable help from some returning students from the workshops, amazing engineers from Transitions, and of course some motivated Scale Rulers.