We love to share

Thibaut Devulder

At 2hD we work in close collaboration but generally a couple of thousand kilometres apart. While the gap between us can come and go, the work needs to flow on a seamless basis. We mash together a number of technologies to achieve this, but one tool has really helped us to crack our file sharing issues: SugarSync.

It is a cloud based backup that allows a fairly fine-grained control over which files get synced to where. We think it is, well... sweet.

If you would care to check it out, we can both benefit from free storage — 500 mb each if you sign up for a free (5 Gb) account, and 10 Gb each if you decide to move up to a paid account. Just follow this referral link. Sweet syncing!

2hD's Alina travels to Romania and Hungary as a trade mission delegate

Thibaut Devulder

Alina has been instrumental in the setting up of a Trade Mission to Romania and Hungary by the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce and the Enterprise Europe Network. Building on our industry and academic contacts in Timisoara, Romania, the mission will also visit Szeged in Hungary to explore new business opportunities in these two emerging markets. 

We packed Alina off with a small stack of our first printed 2hD "brochure" — a simple fold-out A4 flyer that says something about our approach and expertise. The main aim being to look too nice to throw in the bin, provide some intrigue and direct people here to the website. We hope it works...

Sandbox manual

Thibaut Devulder

As part of our submission for the Structures on the Edge competition, we created a fun model sandbox to illustrate the participative construction process for our Stranded installation. We invited the public to interact with the model and to play on a miniature dune, equipped with our scale prototypes of the facetted concrete sculpture and some toy tools.

Of course, we couldn't resist creating a little manual for the sandbox!

2hD in RIBA journal

Thibaut Devulder

A great article on East Midlands regional architecture practice has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. It features 2hD's Alina Hughes talking about her dual roles in practice and education, and the importance for the region of retaining talented graduates.

The Lost Cuckoo takes flight

Thibaut Devulder

We have started work with artist Marcus Rowlands on the Lost Cuckoo project. Working with families from 3 schools in the Bilborough area of Nottingham, we will collaborate on the design of a bespoke cardboard module or system. This will be used by the families and visitors at the International Children’s Theatre and Dance Festival in the live creation of an interactive community sculpture.

In our first set of workshops we asked families to build with standard cardboard boxes and colourful tapes. They produced an amazing array of sculptures and spaces, pushing the boxes to do the unexpected and giving us plenty of inspiration to start the design of our special module.

Further workshops will run over the months until the Festival, on June 4th and 5th at the Lakeside Arts Centre.

This project is being supported by the Lakeside Arts Centre, the Arts Council England, Faspak and Nottingham Education Improvement Partnership.

Quieting the lizard brain

Thibaut Devulder

Seth Godin exhorting us to "thrash at the beginning" of projects so that we can ship on time and on budget.

"What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship," says bestselling author Seth Godin, arguing that we must quiet our fearful "lizard brains" to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.

LaM Pavilion: some technical information

Thibaut Devulder

As we get many enquiries about the inflatable event space we recently designed for the Lille Metropole Museum of Modern Art (LaM), here's a little technical summary.

Dimensions

  • Usable internal area: 360 m2
  • Overall footprint: 400 m2
  • Max dimensions: 40 m (length), 15 m (width), 19 m (overall width), 8 m (height)

Anchors

  • Ground anchors: 500 mm deep Terra-bolt screws (or equivalent traction anchors, metal or plastic), every 2 meters of perimeter 
  • Ballast (alternative): 500kg every 2 meters of perimeter

Inflation system

  • 15 centrifugal fans (12 active plus 3 backups), 1.5 kW power each, equipped with noise silencers.
  • All fan units wired to pressure-sensitive alarm system

Materials

  • Main surface: Ripstop Nylon, white translucent
  • Air beams: PVC coated polyester, white

Feel free to contact us if you need more information...

A photographic dialogue

Thibaut Devulder

To keep our photographic juices flowing, Tom and I started a photographic dialogue more than a year ago. The rule of the dialogue was simple: one at a time, we regularly post images on Flickr, responding to each other's image in some way — form, light, colour, theme, etc. Only two constraints: 1. photos must be chronological and 2. we don't discuss our photos — we just respond with another photo and never explain the response...

Thirteen months later, the photographic dialogue is taking some interesting turns...

We wanted to display this dialogue on our website, but our Content Management System (TextPattern) did not allow this straight out-of-the-box. No problem: we resorted to our proven mashing approach to web design...

Both Tom and I were already using Flickr to share our photos, so it made sense to use this existing service to manage the images and display them on our website in a dialogue format. We did this by creating a private group on Flickr to which we posted our photos, and automatically pulled these images to our website with a few lines of code, using the powerful Flickr API and the PHPFlickr library.

Alina's presidency

Thibaut Devulder

2hD's Alina is president of the Nottingham and Derby Society of Architects (NDSA), and she has been busy! With a revitalised membership and restructured board, the Society now meets twice a month to take forward its plans. A work shadowing scheme has been set up to place architecture students into local practices as part of their studies, a trade mission has been set up to Nottingham's twin city of Timisoara in Romania, and a new web site and lecture series are in the pipeline. 

On the social calendar, the annual NDSA quiz will take place on 6th Dec, and a Facebook group takes care of the networking. 

2hD at Lincoln Architecture Society

Tom Hughes

The Lincoln Architecture Society invited 2hD along to give a talk as part of their evening lecture series. I was genuinely impressed by the professionalism of the students who run the society — an excellent welcome pack in my email a few days before the event giving all the info I needed to get to there and a warm welcome and introduction.

Here are a few of the slides from my talk, which covered the Sky Vault project, the barn conversion in the Dordogne, our work on the NTU architecture course, Mission Control (our hairy micro-office), our Structures on the Edge shortlisted competition entry and the inflatable event space.

Their lecture series looks great — it brings kudos the the Lincoln School of Architecture and is definitely worth checking out if you are in the East Midlands. Take a look at their website.

Adventure Play Centre

Tom Hughes

It's nice to get a recommendation and to support local projects!

This play centre is in need of extra space for an office and creche, and wants to make use of sunken no-man's land corner of their site. However they have no resources for the project until they get funding, and to get that they have to run the idea past the local planners and other stakeholders.

Sometimes in situations like this we can help to break the deadlock by putting a little bit of work in 'up front'. A local contact who we worked with on the Sneinton Trail project put us in touch with the play centre, we went to take a look, and turned out these simple drawings. It's a start.

On one level this is just a feel-good thing to do, but it isn't purely altruistic: it means that there might be a real project sometime in the future (one which would improve our community), we build up a huggable reputation, we might get another recommendation out of it, and we can write and illustrate some self promotional material like this.

Permaculture gardening

Thibaut Devulder

Before winter hits the Serbian hills, I visited the Sokolovica eco-village on the Rtanj mountain in Southern Serbia to help them prepare the gardening raised beds where they will grow most of their food next year.

As part of our permaculture strategy, we wanted to set up the first of a series of deeply mulched raised beds. The first beds were to be placed as close to the house as possible, to make then easier to maintain.

We decided to start small and wrap the first one around a mature apple tree, situated close to the entrance of the site. The shape of the raised bed would follow the drip line of the apple tree (below the perimeter of its foliage), where rain and condensation water tend to naturally get concentrated by its leaves, thus minimising the need to irrigate the bed later on. The drip line is also where the tree’s feeding root are at their densest below ground, so that will maximise interaction with companion plants growing in the raised bed.

Here's a sketch plan of the bed wrapping around the apple tree:

As the raised bed should neither be tilled nor disturbed, we created so called keyhole openings into the bed to allow easy reach to any part of the bed without having to stamp (and compact) the soil.

Placing the bed under the crown of the apple tree made it possible to use its foliage to define a range of different micro-climates in its shadows — protecting the plants below from the hot summer sun and from mid-season morning frosts. The tree foliage would also help protect the bed from the frequent summer thunderstorms, breaking the speed of the rain drops before they could damage the more delicate plants.

The excavation of the nearby reed bed filtering the house's grey water has unearthed a vast supplies of rocks (chalk?) and we decide to reuse some of them to create a border. In addition to keeping the mulch in place, they will provide habitat for small insect predators such as lizards and spiders. Their thermal mass will also play a role in controlling the bed's microclimates: accumulating heat during daytime and acting as condensation traps at dawn. The rest of our full time pest-controlling team — the birds — would happily perch on the apple tree above the bed and keep the insect population under control.

Laying out the raised beds was intuitive and fun: run around the tree with a wheelbarrow to figure the width of path and keyholes. Once this was done, visualising the width of the beds and the position of the keyholes was as as simple as two people walking round while shaking hands — since any part of the bed should be reachable from one of the sides without having to trample the mulch. Refreshingly practical!

The bed was mulched as follows (bottom to top):

  1. a layer of cardboard (reclaimed from local shops) to suppress the weeds under the bed,
  2. a thick pile of decomposing organic matters (pruned branches, food scraps, fallen fruits), mixed with some soil excavated for cellar drainage,
  3. a deep layer of fallen leaves collected from surrounding roads and alleys,
  4. a layer of straw from locally produced bales to insulate the soil and prevent seed germination until spring.

The raised bed was then copiously watered and will be left over winter to decompose into rich humus. Now waiting for the spring to start planting...

Remote model making

Thibaut Devulder

We've just had an exciting collaboration with artist Tristan Hessing on a public art installation for the Lincolnshire coast. Tom and Tristan have been working together in Nottingham to develop the form of the structure, while I was handling the CAD modelling and 3D renders from Belgrade.

As part of the project, we also needed to produce physical models of the faceted shape that Tristan had come up with. With a 3D computer model in Belgrade and a physical model to be built in Nottingham, how to communicate to Tom all the information he needed to quickly fabricate a physical object perfectly matching the numerical one?

The first stage was to check the geometry of the folding pattern with a paper net, which could be printed onto card with our office A3 printer. The Flattery plugin for SketchUp came in handy to explode the facets of the object and generate the tabs to glue the different pieces together. The rather complex geometry required that the net was split into 8 foldable panels, each with a different form.

To simplify the assembly, I colour-coded and labelled the facets and tabs, with some 3D orientation views to explain how the different pieces were meant to be glued together. I emailed Tom a PDF version of this net.

A few hours later, Tom video-conferenced me with the assembled model. So far so good. This paper model would later be spray-painted black and used for one of our models.

We then needed a durable plastic version that could be handled by the public and we called on to the expertise at the workshops at Nottingham Trent University — we both teach there part-time and Tristan is a graduate from their Fine Art school. I generated an STL file from the 3D model and sent it to the workshop, to be fed to their computer controlled milling machine. The idea was to manufacture a strong mould onto which thin plastic versions could be formed by vacuum.

Four hours passed and Tom called me from the workshop with the mould ready, CNC-machined from a solid block of MDF. Nice!

Tom then laboured hard with the workshop team to produce two perfect vacuum-formed plastic shapes. I received the images by email straight from the workshop.

This beats having a 3D printer directly connected to my laptop! Many thanks to the team at the NTU workshops for their expertise and help!

Portfolio project
Stranded: extreme picknicking in the dunes

Tom Hughes

In response to the Structures on the Edge competition, we collaborated with artist Tristan Hessing, of One Thoresby Street, to explore the ambivalent relationship between art and nature conservation. We designed a shifting public art installation on the wild beaches of the Lincolnshire coast, on the theme of extreme picnicking.

The Stranded art installation, slowly eroding within the shifting sand dunes of the Lincolnshire coast

Our chosen site: a fragile dune ecosystem, isolated on a windblown seashore.

Stranded was our shortlisted entry for the 2010 Structures on the Edge art programme, and a distant cousin of our Bathing Beauties competition entry.

The artists’ brief called for small permanent structures in the sand dunes of the Lincolnshire coast that would respond to the wild beauty and harsh environment. Our response was to design an installation for extreme picnicking as a robust response to the rugged nature of the site.

Shifting sands

We decided to make our intervention at a dune crossing point, reinforcing and protecting the dune whilst giving views and shelter for visitors as they move between land and beach. Stranded would be a faceted concrete structure whose shape was derived from the dune surface, but with points raised to provide views and shelter, and others buried beneath the surface to provide foundations. We would see it as a geometric abstraction of the dune landscape, a frozen snapshot of the shifting sands. It might be taken for an archaeological artefact that has been exposed, or is in the process of being covered, by the sands.

Our collaboration with the artist

We found that Tristan shared our approach to understanding the project and our chosen site at Wolla Bank. We took our cameras and tape recorders and had a picnic in the dunes. We talked and sketched and thought, but we also interviewed everyone we could — hikers, families, fishermen, dog walkers, bird watchers.

It became obvious that it was the remoteness and rawness that they appreciated. All of them had visited Wolla Bank many times, and they all praised its quietness and undeveloped nature. Rather than change the place by inserting an icon that would signal development, we decided we should intervene in a strong but subtle way in the landscape.

The making

The process of making Stranded would be intimately connected to these intentions. Creating a mould from the sand of the dune, we would dig out areas of the structure which would be ultimately submerged beneath the ground, and build up areas that would be raised. Finally, we would spray on fibre reinforced concrete to form the structure. The process would be like building a giant sand castle — a hands-on process through which we would engage the local community and visitors.

The exposed concrete areas would collect sand and be blown clean so that the structure would change over time, a process that we would document and that would help to explain the life, mobility and sensitivity of dunes to the visitor.

" 2hD have been committed to delivering the highest standard possible at every opportunity in our collaboration, which is absolutely how it should be and the reason why it has worked so well for all parties.
From our initial shared exploration of the site, they were very engaged with my responses and ideas, responding quickly with visualisations and practical suggestions for the making process. The principle of our collaboration was to understand where our common ground was and how best to pool resources and create design without compromise."

— Tristan Hessing, collaborating artist