Bath Uni Students, FCB Studios & Buro Happold Collaborate to Create a Cocoon Sculpture

26 Jun 2017

The bedrock of the Forest of Imagination is collaboration. This year, students from the Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering at the University of Bath worked alongside architects from Bath-based, architectural and urban design practice, FCB Studios, engineering consultants and specialists, Buro Happold and Bath University Teaching Fellow, Toby Lewis BSC MA RIBA to create installations.

The brief was to create a series of unique, bespoke installations, Houses of Imagination, and build them in Bushey Norwood to be used as workshop spaces for all of the unique artists of Forest of Imagination.

Harry Hewlett, Assistant Modelmaker, and Michael Lewis, Architectural Assistant at FCB Studios explain the thinking behind and the creation of The Cocoonery Sculpture:

“The Cocoonery, is a House of Imagination for artist Alison Harper, who will inhabit the formed space to create miniature cocoons. Alison provided the project with the theme ‘the cocoonery’, representing an area of the forest where creatures rest, sleep, slumber and grow, before emerging into the sunlight.”

The teams explored the site at Bushey Norwood and made the consensus that the cocoon itself should not be the sculpture, as it felt most natural under the canopy of a tree, which created an intimate, sheltered environment.

So they created a sculpture, which took the form of a transition piece between the open field and the cocoon. The experience of a visitor journeying into the cocoonery is manipulated through a series of progressively smaller timber frames and an increasingly dense cladding of felled timber slices, winding their way under the canopy of the tree into the cocoon. The reverse is experienced when exiting the cocoon, emerging into the bright light of the field from the nurturing darkness of the cocoon.

Come and discover the Cocoonery, the sculpture and Forest of Imagination for yourself.