recent photos

time to add some recent photos showing the transparent qualities of the outer skin, reflecting the changes in light level and surrounding sky colour. When the sun comes out, the shape and material of the inner structure glow from within. The inter-relation between plywood & polycarbonate is very satisfying... of solid and transparent, material & immaterial, silence and light...

Roof assembly

I have begun to explore the assembly of the roof. This will consist of three elements; two small side gutter roofs either side of the horizontally spanning louvres across the 2m width along the entire length of the click-raft roof. This will enable a fully openable roof-skin, which will be operated by lego mindstorms robots with light, and temperature sensors.

construction update - outer skin

Time to update the blog at the end of 2008. Many small details have been further developed and refined.
Included amongst these was to finally choose to go for an asymetric mono-pitch roof structure which required taking off all of the roof beams again and re-cutting the click-joints to achieve this. (see construction photos)
The other work being carried out over the last period has been the realisation of the outer skin.
In the end I decided to realise both long side walls in 2500 x 1250 x 10mm vertically assembled polycarbonate panels rather than horizontal louvres.
See the sequence of shots showing their assembly - took a bit of fiddling around to get the right technique going, but with the help of a cake of soap my time per panel came down to 20 mins/panel (incl cutting and assembling joining pieces, the panels and the 200mm stainless steel rod fixings). In the long term with different kinds of fixings this technique could be radically refined and streamlined. For now this is a cheap and straight forward to achieve closure of the entire outer envelope.