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Peter Hulbert Architects' billowing timber roof structure at Chiddingstone Orangery may recall the Weald & Downland Museum, but it takes the gridshell one step further by creating a system that structurally supports the frameless glazing, writes Rory Olcayto
The pleasing geometric clarity of the timber and glass roof structure on Chiddingstone Orangery contrasts sharply with its messy route to delivery. A small, modest scheme located in the village of Chiddingstone, Kent, it's hard to believe that upon completion, one specialist had gone belly up, another didn't make it through to the construction phase and the project had lain abandoned for months before the glazing was installed.
Designed by Tunbridge Wells-based Peter Hulbert Architects with Buro Happold and Haran Glass, nothing on this project is as it first seems.
Just like the project's choppy narrative, the 12m x 5m timber structure is complex. The shell, bound with a prefabricated plywood ring beam, is defined by four layers of sweet chestnut timber strips and one of frameless glass, all held in place by precision engineered details.
Each of these identical stainless-steel "nodes" is responsible for plotting the gentle billow of the roof form. Another layer of cabling triangulates the structure. And in supporting the frameless glazing, this timber gridshell is unique. Neither of its ancestors, Edward Cullinan's Downland Gridshell at Weald & Downland Museum or Glenn Howell's Savill Building at Windsor Great Park, achieves this technical feat.
But the comparison is inaccurate because this gridshell isn't really a roof. Rather than use the existing grade I listed walls, galvanised steel columns reach down from its ring beam and on to a new raft foundation hidden beneath the stone floor. You don't even see the structure when you first approach the Orangery because it's hidden below parapets. It sits within the plan and is boxed out to meet the walls. A structure within a structure or a folly inside a folly, whatever, this is the gridshell that almost never was.
Bizarre history
The history of the...