The selection of stainless steel for the wall frames was important for two reasons. The corrosion protection for an outdoor pavilion in the British summertime. And longer life in the context of the pavilion being rebuilt once it has completed its life in Kensington Gardens. Because the steelwork is effectively inaccessible once constructed, it cannot easily be examined or remediated for corrosion once constructed. One of the significant design challenges of the project is not knowing exactly where the pavilion might end up in its second life.

Welding of stainless material takes place in a separate environment at our facility to prevent cross contamination from other activities. Each frame was carefully jigged prior to welding and the CNC cut base plates informed the radius of each frame. This accuracy in the workshops meant that the entire wall was built on site to a tolerance of less than 10mm.

An intermediate steel plate with a compression strip of foam was included in the wall at half height. This helped spread the forces in the brick columns (a concern due to the lack of mortar bed) and reduced bricks cracking as a result. Once fully stacked with bricks, a top plate was added to further compress the column and torqued up with two M24 nuts.

The 18 slender columns followed the same design as the walls. The difference being that these were only a single brick wide. Our engineering partners worked hard to ensure that these were strong enough to support the compressive force of the roof despite the columns themselves not being of relatively low stiffness. The flexibility of these columns can be observed simply by introducing a bending force by manually pushing the column laterally.

The differentiating feature of the slender columns was that each brick was bonded with a clear adhesive to its neighbour. This wasn’t a structural requirement; however, it prevented the column of bricks becoming misaligned as visitors leant against them.

The roof structure measured approximately 18m x 19m and was fabricated from 42mm diameter mild steel tube welded into a truss framework. The sections were bolted together using M16 nuts. This roof was painted in a marshmallow colour and then clad with polycarbonate sheets using traditional glazing compression fittings to create a waterproof screen.

The roof was connected to the walls by a half-lap bolted connection which transferred the roof load down to the foundation.