Client: Littlehampton Welding Ltdartist: Lee SimmonsLocation: London, United Kingdom
Date: 2017-08-30 00:00:00 +0000 UTCTags: art, bronze, geometry, optimisation
Wellesley Hotel
The Wellesley Hotel screen is a collaboration with artist Lee Simmons, Fabricators Littlehampton Welding and Engineers Fluid Structures. Lee describes the work as a striking artistic intervention to The Wellesley Hotel front elevation terraces. The design culminated in a sculptural screen that acts as an interface to the wider context of the public, which generates a visual stimulation that challenges the viewer to question the piece by the nature of its materiality and construction.
Our role was to develop a number of Grasshopper scripts and geometry modelling workflows for Lee Simmons that enabled a highly complex cast bronze pattern to be easily generated, changed and then edited. This is similar to a number of our projects where our expertise in computational design allied to our core of Structural Engineering has saved a great deal of time and cost for the design team and client. The structure itself consists of thousands of cast bronze buds that are screwed into a cast bronze screen which wraps around the entrance to the hotel. It is due for construction in early 2018.