Stretching the point

摘要

Black pvc stretched as it has never been before has earned Alsop Architects' Spiky pod at Queen Mary Medical School the soubriquet of 'the largest fetish object in London'. Achieving the dramatic shape forced the specialist engineers and subcontractors to push the boundaries of their skills too. Will Alsop is generally credited with the birth of the pod hut 'Spiky', one of the meeting rooms at Queen Mary Medical School (see pages 46-54), bursts free of the rounded shapes we have come to expect. The most complex of the three meeting room pods (the fourth pod is an education centre) within the atrium of the Institute of Cell and Molecular Science, Spiky's smooth seductive form belies an extremely complex process of design development, structural engineering, fabrication and erection. Contractually, this complexity was recognised from the outset. The main body of the project was under the standard JCT 98 contract, but with the pods requiring specialist design and construction techniques, they were added to the project using the Contractors Design Portion Supplement. Main contractor Laing O'Rourke turned to tensile structures fabricator Architen Landrell, whose experience on projects such as Ron Herron's Imagination building in central London and numerous sports facilities stood it in good stead for the job.