Bower

Regent's Place is a working office campus on the edge of Regent's Park in London, whose owner British Land wanted to welcome in the wider city. The brief asked for structures that would signal a new public route into the estate and provide seating and performance space within a newly planted landscape.

The design began with an image of bundled sticks: timber laths gathered loosely enough to create a bundle, but ordered enough to stand as a bower. Three pavilions step up in size and purpose as visitors enter from the west. The smallest shelters a curved seating area. The middle one houses a revolving circular bench for passing children and adults. The largest encloses a performance space for the local community theatre.

Each pavilion is built from laminated oak laths, more than 400 across the three, cut from short sections of sustainably sourced French oak and assembled in four concentric layers of varying lengths which, when combined are self-supporting. Models and digital simulation established the geometry before timber specialists fabricated the laths in southwest England. Large segments were assembled off site to reduce cutting waste and installation time, and steel bases anchor each pavilion and carry uplighting for evening use.

The pavilions are made to come apart as deliberately as they were put together. Individual laths can be replaced as they weather, and each structure can be deconstructed in full and reassembled elsewhere, allowing the oak to be reused beyond this installation. FSC-certification of all of the timber ties the structures back to managed forests.