When is a door not a door?

The Imperial War Museum (IWM), London has reopened!  It's a great place for looking at innovative ways of getting from one space to another. These doors, hatches and openings often work to high performance design requirements, having to be air-tight, water-tight, or deal extreme structural loads etc.  I really enjoyed dragging my kids around, describing the high levels of innovation.

So, for any architect who has gone stir-crazy at some point, preparing door schedules, details and elevations, which are essentially the same basic product dressed up in different ways, here's a collection of some of the fun and clever alternatives on display.

Innovation in the design of doorways, from the basic openings of the air raid shelter to the blast doors of the tank.  Centre, the fuselage of a submarine is designed to create a person-sized space between chambers - a structural solution to a human scale.

The IWM London also demonstrates how design teams can work closely to integrate components so that each has several functions, maximising efficiency.  This is a subject of previous blog posts where design integration (as a progression from design co-ordination) is something seldom seen in the building industry.

The spigot on this Japanese war plane acts as the structural support for the wing and an exhaust duct from the engine: One item working in response to structural, environmental and aesthetic (aerodynamic) requirements.

On this theme there are lots of other cool places to visit with kids during the Summer holidays, to discover innovative ways of getting from one space to another.  We've spent time at The Science Museum, RAF Museum, the Transport Museum and HMS Belfast in London and the Imperial War Museum in Duxford.

Hatches, doors and entrances to a selection of innovative products.
Bottom left demonstrates the thickness of the monocoque fuselage of a 747 Jumbo Jet - the material which separates you and a six-mile drop!

Beyond museums, there's lots of useful references available on the internet from military sources,

It's amazing what an aircraft can do.

Submarines,

Imagine living in some of these environments for months on end.

Space stations and vehicles,

From the International Space Station and Apollo landing capsule.

Buildings,

Non conventional doors in buildings often lead to non conventional ways of using them...

and Sci-fi.

References from Sci-Fi.  Star Wars has lots of great ideas.

These examples are included as the start of a collection on a Pinterest board.

My kids tell me they are looking forward to going back to school!

Monocoque Structures - For Kids

One of the exercises on the carousel of activities described in our post Architecture for Kids, was making monocoque structural enclosures with cardboard.  The idea is really simple.  A set of cardboard shapes attach together at their edges with bulldog clips.  As three dimensional arrangements, they take on their own structural integrity, even in flimsy cardboard.  Using panels as structural components in preference to frame structures has the advantage of not requiring cross bracing or triangulated structural paths, which we noted in Play Time.  The set consists of only a few shapes taken from the platonic solids (equilateral triangle, square, pentagon) and the Bucky-ball (hexagon).

The platonic solids

The Bucky-Ball: Pentagon and hexagon form the basis of geodesic structures.

The key constraint is that the edges of all the shapes are the same length so they fit together neatly.

Shapes made from scrap card with rotary cutting and perforating blades.
Shapes make model panels for monocoque constructions.

Equilateral triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon - the toolkit of shapes (panels).

Starting with the platonic solids as a base and expanding from there, it is quite easy to make interesting geometric enclosures which retain their structural integrity.

Platonic solids Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Dodecahedron, Icosahedron plus the Bucky Ball

With this set of components, the possibilities for making shapes and enclosures are great.  The design might be for a den, a space to stand in, a bridge, a space to sleep in, or just a experiment to build to build the biggest structure possible.

An additional bonus of the system, combinations of panels (especially triangular ones) allow structural enclosures to move and morph in to different shapes when junctions are freed up.

They are so simple, the kids in the architecture workshops took to them straight away, working with them to create their own unique spaces.

Testing how the panels go together to make enclosures with a Year 5 class at Furzedown Primary School.
(Botton left, a space bug enough to crawl in to...) 

The implications to architectural design are not insignificant.  Scaling the shapes up in to larger sized building panels, they could be used as a design solution for any number of functions, from a garden office, to a pop up cinema, to relief shelters, or to a fully weather tight building.  With the same connection strategy at the edges, panels can be made out of different materials to be solid and insulated (walls), be permeable to air (give ventilation), clear or translucent (windows and roof lights), or provide access (doors).

Possibilities of building monocoque structures with a selection of
- panel shapes and
- panel materials
to create a wide variety of functional enclosures.

This little system offers the possibility of a flexible design solution for creating rapidly deployed structures with a single process assembly.  This single process is something which is in contrast to the increasing complexity of structures such as the wall in our current building industry and could prove an advantageous innovation.