
Re:Source Pavilion "Fletning"
The organizers of WCTE 2023 initiated a pavilion as a side event to The World Conference on Timber Engineering 2023 in Oslo. Its purpose was not only to communicate the conference's theme "Timber for a Livable Future" to conference visitors and to the broader public, but also to highlight Norway's competence in this realm and to bring together Norwegian companies.
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) contributed through a master studio course to develop the pavilion’s design. The final student concept for the pavilion “Fletning” has been realized in a collaboration with master’s students and teachers at the School of Architecture and Design in Oslo (AHO), Norwegian engineering companies, material suppliers and manufacturers.
WCTE2023: https://wcte2023.org/wcte-pavilion-fletning/
The master's course Re:Source Pavilion (Timber Studio fall 2022) focused on “disregarded” wooden materials – waste wood from demolitions, cut-offs from construction sites, cut-outs from CLT production, wood that had served as concrete formwork, worn out pallets and materials from obsolete barns. The environmental potential of wooden materials is maximized with their prolonged life span. 21 students have explored the materials’ poetic and conceptual potential, their constructive capacity and the role of various joining options. Their concepts and designs have been gradually refined and developed into three final pavilion projects that have been exhibited at AHO at the end of the semester and during WCTE2023.
Course book: https://www.calameo.com/books/0065437313b27e85aa97e
https://aho.no/en/calendar/aho-world-conference-timber-engineering-exhibition-opening
Winning student project "Fletning":
During the processing of wood into standardized industrial building materials, wood loses one of its original qualities, namely the organic shapes of the tree and its parts. This pavilion project’s ambition was twofold: to create organic shapes with highly standardized industrialized wooden materials, and to mainly use short dimensions as more readily available from wood waste and cut-offs.
“Fletning” means weaving in Norwegian. By stacking rows of short, offset 2’x4’ pieces (“wood bricks”) with altering angles, the resulting semi-transparent walls allow glimpses through the construction that vary with every step when passing by. Towards the wall’s top, the pieces gradually increase in length and create a cantilevering canopy. In some places, other walls’ tops complete the geometry of an archway. Three such walls are arranged in a curved geometry that both ensures stability and creates subspaces for smaller exhibition sections, sitting areas or a podium. The structure’s geometry has been parametrized in a digital model for full flexibility in the form-finding process, and to allow the use of potential alternative "re:sources" with different dimensions. The pavilion could not be anchored in the ground. In order to compensate for the laterally projecting walls’ lack of weight, the students suggest a disk-shaped roof element that is filled with earth for weighing down the pavilion against wind forces. It is clad with disused offprint metal sheets that mirror the construction and visually continue the pavilion’s central space. Another option could be to omit the roof plate and to hide sandbags in the two podiums instead. The wall itself is made up of smaller ca.1m wide blocks that consist of 11 wood brick layers and weigh about 38kg each. They are joint by long wooden dowels that create a loose fit with the middle layers’ holes and a tight and permanent connection with the outer layers. Stacks of these blocks are held together with steel rods, and these segments are joined with other stack segments.
Depending on the “re:source’s” provenience – either from a waste facility or collected at a production facility – the materials’ surface will either be weathered or more or less pristine. In contrast to most conventional products with the exposed surfaces aligned with the wood fibres’ direction, here the end-grain’s cut fibres face the visitor. If most pieces are cut to length, only a few weathered pieces will mix up the frontal view’s colouring, but due to their angled placement, also the lengths’ surfaces will be discernible. As only parts of the pavilion are protected by a roof, its walls will weather differently and increase the walls’ visual homogeneity.
Conference paper: https://www.proceedings.com/content/069/069179-0472open.pdf
Realised project:
For the pavilion that was exhibited at Oslo Central Station during the World Conference on Timber Engineering 2023, two parts of the students' design have been built. Instead of the roof disk, sandbags were hidden in each podium to add weight. The pavilion was prefabricated in larger segments, limited by the size of a truck. After the conference, both pavilion parts have been moved to each their new location where they continue to serve as social meeting points and as demonstrators for the design potential of "disregarded" wooden materials.