Process booklet - Material Acts

PROCESS BOOKLET Material acts Semester 1 Lucy Bambury W1649544

T R A D E & C R A F T I N S P I TA L F I E L D S A conceptualisation of the layering of spaces for my proposed aerospace innovation centre in response to the civic palace typological study and sites rail connection.

17 00s

Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

French Immigration

17 80s

18 81

Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

Jewish Immigration

Industrial Revolution

Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

19 50s

Real Estate

Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

Bengali Immigration

Manufacturing

Huguenot Weavers

17 00s

Regent Canal opening Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

18 20

Funiture Trade

Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

18 60s

Jewish Tailoring Industry Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

18 81

Bengali Textile Industry Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

19 50s

Industrial Decline

Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

19 70s

Urban Regeneration

Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

19 90s

Huguenots settle in Spitalfields after catholic persecution in france

EAST END TRADE GUILD A conceptualisation of the layering of spaces for my proposed aerospace innovation centre in response to the civic palace typological study and sites rail connection.

“Business g ro up s usua lly ca ter fo r b ig b us in e s s e s . There wa sn’t much a ro und fo r s m a l l

b u s in e s s e s

o ther tha n ser vices a nd a ccess to f ina nce”

l o ca l l y o wned s m a l l in d e p e n d e n t b usinesses o f a ll secto rs to g ether to s p e a k a s o n e a nd to ta ke a ctio n o n their

“Our a im is to b r ing

co ncer ns“

T R A D E & C R A F T I N S P I TA L F I E L D S A conceptualisation of the layering of spaces for my proposed aerospace innovation centre in response to the civic palace typological study and sites rail connection.

18 20

George Ince Moved to Splitalfields

18 36

First accounts of umbrella orders

18 50

Rib stell for umbrellas invented

18 71

James Ince & Sons formed

18 72

Business moves to 64 Bishops Gate

19 20

Business moves to 26-27 Norton Folgate

19 41

Business moves to 298 Bishops Gate

19 83

Richard James Ince joins company

19 85

180th Anniversary

19 96

Business moves to 63 Vyner Street

19 98

Richard James Ince takes over Business

Huguenot silk weaver’s by Enoch Ward,

HUDSON YARD, FURNITURE WAREHOUSE & SHOWROOM 58 - 60 CHARLOTTE ROAD

W A Hudson, manufacturors of curtain poles and furniture since 1890, occupied 58 - 60 Charlotte Road and 117 - 119 Curtain Road.

An example of one of the many Warehouse and showrooms which were built towards the end of the 19th century. They marked the moving from combined shop / dwellings, to a combined workshop and shop, with residential space being seperated.

ARTHUR GANSON

https://www.arthurganson.com/thinking-chair

HENRY HERRMANN FACTORY DOD STREET, LIMEHOUSE, 1891 Visual of the canalside factory, where wood was transported by barge to the yard, and offloaded with cranes.

CAIRD & RAYNOR, SAIL-MAKERS’ AND SHIP-CHANDLERS’ 1889 - 1972 777, COMMERCIAL ROAD, E14 “The company produced water treatment plant, often for naval use and as such, they were regarded as a strategic industry during the war and there is a tale of one engineer who went off to join up, only to be ordered back by the military. Due to the risk of being bombed out of London, the wartime government decreed that Caird & Rayner should have a shadow factory to which business could be transferred should the need arise. A property was located in Watford, and taken over by Caird & Rayner ‘for the duration’ but remained in the company thereafter. During the 1960s, business had declined, and it was decided to relinquish the Commercial Road site and concentrate on Watford. There were redundancies, I believe, but the firm substantially relocated to Watford and our family moved in about 1967 to a place in Hemel Hempstead, within easy commuting distance of the Watford site. The move out of Commercial Road had it’s ‘moments’. The building was, as you say, a sailmaker’s loft, which meant the main part of the building had just a ground floor and a full height space in which to hang and manage sails, with a gallery round the insider perimeter, at first floor level. With the building’s use as an engineering works, many machine tools had been installed in the gallery - lathes, milling machines, drills and the like. As machinery came out for transport, the weights were tallied up, but only until the company got scared when they realised the place should have long ago collapsed under the load.”

Inhabitants of Boundary Estate

v https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yVXt7niyD0

Showroom warehouses

Factories and workshops

Associated trade, varnish and upholstery suppliers, cabinet ironmongers etc.

Timber yards, timber merchants, Sawmills and wood-working premises.

HUGUENOT WEAVER’S HOUSE 4, PRINCELET STREET

Huguenot Weaver’s houses first appeared in the 17th century, with the immigration of the French Huguenots. They consisted of dwelling spaces on the lower floors, with the top floor reserved for silk looms, as workshops with large windows to allow plenty of light into the spaces.

MARLOW WORKSHOPS ARNOLD CIRCUS, E2

Built in 1899 as a part of a group of workshops on the Boundary Street Estate, the Marlow Workshops consisted of 4 units per block - 2 with a taking-in-door on the first floor.

These workshops allowed smaller scale production, for vaious upholstery and furniture companies. ‘‘Because of the modest size of many businesses, multiple occupation of workshops was commonplace. When different types of firms shared the same premises a ‘hand-inhand’ system was able to develop, as articles of furniture passed from one business to another, completing each stage of the production process in turn. within such multi-tenanted workshops space could be let by the floor or the room’ - English Heritage.

SUNBURY WORKSHOPS 1899 Swanfield Street, E2.

“The Boundary Estate, Peabody’s splendid 19th Century solution to the hovels and hideouts, sits inside the old historic ‘Jago’ of Bethnal Green - an historic place of fearsome reputation, of abject poverty and loathsome crimes of 19th Century London.” - RCA Society.

Existing internal ground floor workshop.

Existing internal First Floor Workshop.

SUNBURY HOUSE, THE BOUNDARY ESTATE 1893 E2.

THE BOUNDARY ESTATE 1893 E2.

My first model, experimenting with the idea of manufacturing, combining the history of the furniture manufacture and the history of the site and passing items between workshops and different specialists. The falling of the chairs mimics their movement through the site as they are worked on by various artisans.

A sketch of the Sunbury Workshops, imagining how the facade would look if it was animated by local craftsmen and residents of the Sunbury house apartments. A combination of the new artisans in the area and the Bangladeshi community, with the goal of creating more understanding and unity.

Screens made from bamboo and ‘Muslin’ effect fabric, movable and deployable to allow community to adapt to its needs.

Traditional threading together of bamboo to create moora stools.

TOWER HAMLET’S LIVEABLE STREETS SCHEME

The Liveable Streets scheme, is an initiative to improve the quality of the public realm for the local community on Brick Lane. Through the pedestrianisation of streets after a certain time on certain days of the week, it aims to establish better relationships with the streets, and promote the safety of residents.

The ward has a population which is 80% Bangladeshi, and yet the local Masjids do not provide a good quality of prayer space for female Muslims, which is due to cultural expectations and limitations of space. There are many mosques which provide great spaces for women to pray. I would like to generate spaces that open out with the Brick Lane liveable streets scheme, that can be used by the local community - by all age groups and genders, but also as safe spaces for prayer and reflection.

GRYMSDYKE FARM EXPERIMENTATION

During my time at Grymsdyke farm, a centre specialising in material research and fabrication, I experimented with bamboo, specifically its elastic nature and how it acts in tension.

Initially, I used bamboo poles, using a traditional technique of cutting ‘V’ shapes into the rods, to bend and fix the rod to the desired curve using wood glue (see images below), but these were difficult to work with, ad had less flexibility than the bamboo slats photographed to the left. To achieve a great enough bend, I used jute string to hold the bamboo slats at a desired angle.

GREEN CAMP - MEDITATION SPACES - BAMBOO U

A roof structure constructed using a bamboo frame ‘shell’, with fixed cotton sheets coated with a bio-epoxy (mixture of hardener and resin) to achieve a waterproof finish.

The roof form mimics the movement of a Dirvish dress - worn by the dancers while twirling.

Bamboo ‘Lidis’ is used, a particular form of bamboo with great flexibility. Thus allowing the extreme angles to be formed, in 3 directions. This allows the final form to have a fluid look to it.

MODELLING

ARRANGEMENT

ASSEMBLY

SKETCH OF ASSEMBLY / EXPERIMENTATION AT SCALE

POLES - CNC in halves, with holes for joining to bamboo frame.

FABRIC - Muslin/cotton coated in bio-epoxy resin and hardener.

TENSILE ELEMENTS - thin bamboo ‘ribbon’.

MOULDING THE CURVE

MEMBRANE Benjamin Hubert

Called Membrane, the chair by Benjamin Hubert for German brand Classicon comprises a steel and aluminium frame covered in 3D-woven mesh fabric.

THE BOUNDARY ESTATE 1893 E2.

BANGLADESHI PRIDE ON BRICK LANE

Azmal Hussain Owner of Preem Restaurant and Balti House

“I was a Muktijuddho myself. I fought in the war. When I was a teenager, there was some trouble, and I was arrested and put in jail. My father was an important person in East Pakistan, and he didn’t want me to participate in politics. I was handing out leaflets and my father was angry. He told me if I was arrested, he wouldn’t bail me out and he kept my word. My mother sent someone else to bail me out. We are proud to be Bangladeshi.”

Shundor Ali Employee at Rajmahal Sweets

“My father and uncles were involved in the war. I was three months old when my mum carried me in her arms and hid in different places in my village, Sunamganj, Chhatak. My father supported the Muktijuddho, by taking food to the guerilla fighters and helping people who were trapped, trying to flee their homes.”

Abdul Ahad Owner of City Spice

“I’ll tell you something, here, about Brick Lane. My son recently graduated and has got a job in investment banking, so he’s doing very well financially. You know what he does regularly on a Sunday and Monday evening? He comes here and works. I didn’t ask him to. He says to me “Dad, it’s not the money. I just love it here, seeing people - customers coming in and going satisfied. The people that come here on Brick Lane, you know the vibe... How all the people know each other in the community. It’s not like work at all here. It’s the culture, it’s like we’re hanging out.”

MOORA CHAIR A traditional Bangladeshi hand crafted chair. Common in most homes, the structure utilises the flexibility of bamboo, and a parametric shape which disperses the resultant force when someone sits on it through the bamboo rods, held in place through tension.

RAHEMUR RAHMAN Bangladesh 50 exhibition

An exhibition held in Whitechapel, exploring the Bangladeshi fight for freedom, with 2021 marking the 50th anniversary of its independence on the 16th December. The exhibition consisted of traditionally printed fabric, made with the youth of the local community, as a way to promote Bangladeshi culture and crafts.

BAMBOO AND TENSION

Initial experiments with bamboo and tension, working at 1 to 1 scale at Grymsdyke Farm. Through these experiments I was able to test the flexibility of bamboo, and its limitations when used in tension. I experimented with tensegrity structures, however I decided that the resultant structure needed for the structure to stand by itself, resulted in an unappealing aesthetic (see photo to left).

Experimenting with stacking the bow structures. This results in a more interesting form, however the string which is required to hold the curve of the individual arcs reduces the usable space of the screen.

I made a Jig with a guide for the curve to be achieved with each piece of bamboo in the wood workshop in Fablab, as shown below. This ensured that I had a consistent curve, as in my first iteration at Grymsdyke farm, I was not creating the same curve with each arch I constructed. It also held the curve in place while I threaded through the holes I had drilled, this thread held the curve in tension when the bamboo was removed from the rig.

Experiments with weaving using plywood, as it has similar properties to bamboo. I laser cut various thickness’s and depths of ply, and experimented with weaving, to understand which thickness of elements best worked.

Adjusting input Brep surface The first attempt at the script resulted in an irregular woven surface, due to the face that the input Brep was not uniform (if you were to cut it in section, it would be different each time), whereas in this second attempt, I used a Brep that is uniform in section lengthways throughout. This means that when dividing up the Brep in the script, uniform values are returned along each curve.

These Brep surfaces were both made using the ‘loft’ command in rhino, with 2 curves that I had drawn in the first attempt these curves were different, but in the second iteration I used the same curve, which I copied and moved.

First iteration Brep input

Iteration 1 - using cuboids to weave on a surface generated from non-planar curves.

Second iteration Brep input

Iteration 2 - a uniform weaving pattern, using the pipe function to generate cylindrical weaving elements. Uses a surface generated from two planar curves.

Weaving simulation - Iteration 1

After exploring a design combining fabric and bamboo, I decided to look at a more minimalistic design of bamboo woven together to form a canopy. Above is my first attempt at creating a woven canopy in grasshopper.

The above script generates the geometry seen to the left from a BREP surface. The DeBrep command takes a Brep surface and returns its faces, edges and vertices. 4 edges are returned by this command, and by using the item function, I drew up the first edge, and ‘i+1’ selects the next edge. I can then input these edges into the PFrames function, which generates frames perpendicular to the edges, as shown in image A below.

I then went on to use the Curve | Plane function to produce the points at which the curves intersect with the frames from the PFrames function and the BRep|Plane (sec) function, which generates curves based on where the PFrames and original mesh intersect. This will give me the points at which the threads will weave together later on.

A

B

COMPUTER MODELLING

Using Rhino and Grasshopper, I was able to trial the curvature of the canopy before making it - this allowed me to confirm what dimension roof would best fit the existing buildings to either side.

Iteration 2

Weaving simulation - Iteration 3

I wanted to combine the geometry from iteration 2 with the cuboidal weaving elements I created using Loft2 in iteration 1, as the bamboo I would be using would be cuboidal in section rather than cylindrical. I copied over and adjusted the number of weaving elements in the scripts to generate a geometry which combined the 2 previous iterations.

To the right is the section of script used to generate the cuboidal weaving elements. I divided the curve used from iteration 2, and generated poly lines through these points. The poly line was then exploded, and perpendicular frames were created using the PFrame function. The frames were aligned, using a Z vector, and a rectangle was the generated using these frames as a base, and a domain of values determining the dimension.

This rectangle was then input into the Sweep1 function, along with the exploded lines to ‘sweep’ the cuboid along, to generate the geometry.

The Arc at Green School / IBUKU Indonesia A sports hall, with a roof held in tension by the woven bamboo covering and bamboo poles spanning the site.

BANGLADESHI HERITAGE PAVILLION

A canopy assembled annually by the local community residing in Sunbury House, and those working in the Sunbury workshops. There will be various workshops held under the canopy, educating and engaging with the public regarding Bangladeshi culture and heritage - and the importance of ‘Victory Day’ for the Bangladeshi people, and the Bangladeshi community on Brick Lane.

THE FINAL MODEL

The canopy will be fixed to the existing buildings on either sides parallel to it lengthways. These fixings will allow for the structure to be woven flat, at ground level, and then raised using spanning elements (wire), resulting in the desired curve.