Aecom engineers reveal challenges of building this year’s Serpentine Pavilion

This latest Serpentine Pavilion will finally be unveiled this week.

The pavilion was designed by Johannesburg-based practice Counterspace, directed by architect Sumayya Vally, and engineering and technical advisory services were provided by Aecom.

Its opening was postponed from last summer due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with work pausing in March 2020 when it “became apparent that the summer wasn’t going to be the place to create a new gathering space”, Aecom senior engineer Madalina Taylor explained to NCE.

As the pavilion finally opens, the significance of its theme, which plays homage to places of meeting, organising and belonging across London neighbourhoods, is clear.

“Everyone has become acutely aware of how important gathering spaces are,” Taylor said.

“When you’re in the pavilion, because it’s quite open and you’re surrounded by the beautiful Kensington Gardens you’re in nature but you’re in a space that celebrates communities and gatherings. And I think for the last year when we’ve all been quite isolated it really resonates with the pavilion this year how important it is to celebrate places like this.”

The pavilion’s concept didn’t change during the Covid pause, although it did provide space for the team to “play around a bit” with the materials used.

Aecom buildings and places director Jon Leach explained: “The whole programme of the pavilion is notoriously very short because it’s about spontaneity so we tried to recreate that.

“So it was pens down last March and then we picked it up towards the end of January [2021]. So effectively we didn’t have much more time than we would have previously, albeit we had a bit more time to just think about things.”

The design is based on meeting places across several London neighbourhoods significant to diasporic and cross-cultural communities, including Brixton, Hoxton, Tower Hamlets, Edgware Road, Barking and Dagenham and Peckham.

These places include some of the first mosques built in the city, such as Fazl Mosque and East London Mosque, cooperative bookshops including Centerprise, Hackney; entertainment and cultural sites including The Four Aces Club on Dalston Lane, The Mangrove restaurant and the Notting Hill Carnival.

“Sumayya did a lot of research around spaces in London and she abstracted all of those spaces and got them together into what effectively is a new gathering space in Kensington Gardens,” Taylor said.

Engineering challenges included the need to fit the structure around the architecture, which was based on these abstract forms.

At more than 6m high the structure is one of the tallest pavilions in recent years and with a footprint of approximately 350m², it is also one of the largest. With every angle critical to the design, the Aecom team worked closely with Counterspace to ensure no attention to detail was lost during development and construction.

“The most important thing was paying homage to all these abstract forms. So the structure fitted in around that,” Taylor said.

“That meant there are a lot of unique details – pretty much everything is bespoke whether it’s in the steel work or cladding, where normally you would have one or two different details that we work out and the idea gets repeated across the pavilion.”

Drainage provided another challenge with the pavilion “sunken in” with a mound formed around it – effectively like a sink.

“So we had to think about how we drained that space properly without wrecking the concept,” Taylor said.

“We ended up putting a series of slot drains and we thought carefully about areas where water could gather and limited them to those areas. All of those slot drains connect to a perimeter gravel channel underneath that connects to storage crates that are there year on year.”

The pavilion – which is the eighth Aecom has worked on – is built of reclaimed steel, cork and timber covered with micro-cement. The varying textures, hues of pink and brown are drawn directly from the architecture of London and reference changes in quality of light.

The primary structure is made entirely from steelwork salvaged from other projects. Already in storage at contractor Stage One’s yard where all elements of the pavilion were prefabricated off site, this minimised the embodied carbon of the structure both in material production and transportation.

Cork produced as a by-product from the wine industry and micro-cement derived from lime and waste from marble production were also used in the structure’s cladding.  This innovative material selection, combined with the use of sustainably sourced timber in the secondary structures, resulted in a pavilion build that is carbon negative.

Aecom has previously defended the use of concrete on the pavilion, after the project was widely criticised for its “excessive use”, as reported by NCE sister title Architects’ Journal. Leach emphasised the use of repurposed materials and the carbon negative build.

“Hopefully that says it all,” he said. “The concrete was the minimum amount we could use and the reason we need it is it’s one of the biggest pavilions we have – it’s tall and we’re not allowed to install permanent foundations to use year on year. So it’s as little as we could get away with.”

The pavilion will be open from June to October.

Source https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/aecom-engineers-reveal-challenges-of-building-this-years-serpentine-pavilion-09-06-2021/

Department of Civil Engineering https://www.ibu.edu.ba/department-of-civil-engineering/