Bridging the Playground
How do you get a gang of nine-year-olds interested in the challenges of structural design, architecture and engineering?
Easy: Just add water and then challenge students to create bridges over it to take the weight of their whole class [weighing in at around a ton] using nothing more than recycled or ephemeral materials such as card, PET water bottles or paper …
The floating bridge was assembled and tested for the first time in Farmiloes’ courtyard as part of the celebrations for the first London Architectural Biennale, which was set in historic Clerkenwell, where we had studios for many years.
Water has been a centrally important part of Clerkenwell’s history, from its springs, wells and spas to the later breweries and distilleries. Clerkenwell was also the site of London’s first reservoir. Now we have little direct knowledge of where our water comes from and often no longer even consume it from the tap. Water now costs more than soda, milk and gas in the US. The fetishizing of water and its packaging is probably the single greatest threat to human and animal survival across the globe.
The design brief was for a floating structure to support the 20 strong class. We posed questions around the themes of water, volume and objects that sink, float or submerge. Experiments were carried out at home and in the classroom and recorded. From this the class’s weight was established and therefore the amount of buoyancy needed to resist that weight in water and the displacement it could cause. A calculation based on a 1.5L Evian bottle, ascertained the number of bottles needed. We began testing methods of jointing and packing. A visit was also made to Future Systems’ Pedestrian Bridge at West India Quay.
“While the project is just a teaching aid for now, its commonplace building blocks make it cheap to build. If a small-scale model can divert hundreds of plastic bottles away from a landfill, there’s no reason a bigger project couldn’t use up even more in the real world, while creating easily assembled emergency bridges, rafts or a makeshift rescue craft.”
Lot of bottle, Spark issue 3, guardian.co.uk
