Photography: Studio NAARO
EmTech Post-Graduate Programme at the Architectural Association has a long history in designing and creating structures and pavilions. This year’s pavilion is titled Re-Emerge and is the first time since the pandemic that the students could closely work together, fabricate and assemble a full scale structure.
For this collaboration, Hassell gave the students the challenge to keep the carbon footprint of the project to an absolute minimum and therefore only use reclaimed timber.
Xavier De Kestelier, Head of Design at Hassell said: “The students really took on the challenge with both hands and decided early on to build the pavilion out of timber from reclaimed wooden pallets”
The Re-Emerge pavilion explores new design and construction technologies that repurpose materials which have completed their first life cycle towards innovative structural formations. The project addresses themes of generative design, material computation, large-scale fabrication and assembly technologies, emphasising the pavilion's ecological impact from the early phases of the design process onwards.
Re-emerge revives the tradition of building on Bedford Square as a collaboration between an academic programme at the AA and partners from the world of practice, to test ideas at scale and imagine new possibilities.
Dr. Elif Erdine, Director of the EmTech Program said: "This collaboration with Hassell demonstrates a successful illustration of how academia and practice can come together to discover novel solutions to complex spatial and material problems. With the support of our other sponsors, BuroHappold Engineering and One Click LCA, EmTech and Hassell explored new design and construction technologies for repurposing timber."
She added: "As designers, architects, and engineers, we share the responsibility to maintain a mindful approach towards our environment while designing and building. Our mutual insight into how construction waste can be a useful resource has originated this research into repurposing timber for an outdoor structure that is lightweight, emphasising the project’s ecological impact from the early phases of the design process."
The EMTECH (Emergent Technologies and Design Programme) is a post-professional graduate degree at the Architectural Association open to graduates in architecture and engineering who wish to develop skills and pursue knowledge in architectural design science that is located in new production paradigms. We are continuing to investigate new synergies of architecture and ecology through the critical intersection of computational design and fabrication. Our projects are pursued by multiple iterations through hypothesis, material and computational experimentation, robotic fabrication, and evaluation; reflected upon in verbal presentations and group discussions and documented in analytical and scientifically structured papers.
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