Goodwood 2021 (2021)

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Client: Unit 9
Artist: Unit 9
Location: Goodwood, UK

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Date: 2021-07-10 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
Tags: Public art, tensegrity, sculpture, steel, stainless steel

Goodwood 2021

In spring 2021 we were engaged by artists Unit 9 to collaborate on the design of an ambitious central feature for the Goodwood Festival of Speed that summer. The work was also intended to be backdrop for the launch of the new Lotus Emira sports car. Despite the extremely short design and build programme we were able to design what we believe to be the worlds largest tensegrity cantilever from scratch, to design each and every connection, detail all the fabrication drawings and assist with the sequence of erection.

A work of this complexity was only possibly by the use of K2E, our self written structural analysis plug-in for Grasshopper, scripted links between geometry and finite element software to check every connection in detail and with the augmented reality platform Fologram to check the alignment of members on site.

Lotus own words best sum up the achievement ‘The impression is of a structure made more from air than actual material. Colin Chapman would have approved’

All photographs by Crate47 http://crate47.com/

Awards

The project was shortlisted for an IABSE Small Project award in 2022.

Research

A paper was written on the project and published in the Springer Jounral “Architecture and Design for Industry 4.0”. The citation for the paper and a link to the publication can be found below.

Church, M., Melville, S. (2024). Lotus Aeroad—Pushing the Scale of Tensegrity Structures. In: Barberio, M., Colella, M., Figliola, A., Battisti, A. (eds) Architecture and Design for Industry 4.0. Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36922-3_45

A pre-print of the paper can be found here