Alexandra Zoupa

I was one of the volunteers who helped in the construction of the Mobile Orchard.

 

'The Mobile Orchard is a new public installation by atmos - an inhabitable hymn to the urban fruit tree, commissioned as the centrepiece for the City of London Festival 2013.

 

Its exuberant design celebrates the wonder of trees, and offers a magical mutation – a welcoming structure tailored to humans.

 

The project seeks to create a new kind of public landscape that merges the best of man-made design and organic nature. It offers a labyrinth of complex, intriguing, generous spaces that seek to nourish all the senses – celebrating both natural trees, and the communion of cities.

 

It centres on a large, sculptural timber oasis that doubles as immersive summer street furniture – morphing into seating, shelter, stairway and sky-throne.Its undulating roots offer a landscape for lounging, including sinuous benches and molten armchairs that cradle the gaze upwards through the hollow trunk.

 

Massive branches worm outwards from a dramatically leaning trunk to offer further seats, splaying to form steps that flow upwards to a branch-clad throne at the tip.

 

A lightweight latticework of aluminium unfurls from the laminated plywood grains to support a canopy of laser-cut leaves – each blade a local London borough, with the host borough further subdivided into wards – the blossom and seeds of the project.

 

Electric LED lighting threads through its veins, uniting base and crown, its sinuous lines like section-cuts that graphically describe the segments of its core geometry, terminating in glowing bulbs of moon-light spots.

 

The installation is edible – cradling a constellation of real apples, refreshed daily, that are ripe for the plucking by any member of the public.It is accompanied by a choir of young fruit trees that, like the modular nature of the tree itself, will grow over time, awaiting a future in schools and orchards across London.

 

The project will host a series of events and performances, including specially-commissioned theatre and music, a Fruit-Feast dinner and an Urban Picnic of gleaned fruit and veg from the team at Feeding the 5,000.

 

The Orchard moves each week to a new venue in the City of London before its young live trees are distributed to schools and orchards across London, and its sculptural centrepiece donated to Trees for Cities, who will tour it across Britain for 5 years.

 

Come sit and climb – pick and feed – explore and wonder. Surf the Sky ; Eat the View.'  (http://www.mobileorchard.info)

 

Technical Overview

 

The Mobile Orchard was designed as a fluid, freeform set of solids – each governed by a complex set of ergonomic, regulatory, geometric and fabricational constraints – that could then be auto-sliced, labelled and arrayed for simple CNC cutting.

 

Like a tree, it has a unique grain – a radiating grid of 30-degree segments, each composed of parallel laminated slices of 4mm birch plywood, bound and wound back to central tree rings within the hollow trunk.

 

Every other segment worms out as an undulating root of public seating, converging in a sumptuous trunk base that contains 1.2kg of ballast to counter both live and dead loads on the cantilevering, spiralling trunk above. A family of 20 removable bifurcating branches ties into carefully engineered double-chamfered slots winding up the trunk, wound in and bolted, then capped by a sinuous seam of LED lighting that runs in 16mm-wide excavated grooves up and over the entire tree.

 

Thin folded laser-cut aluminium secondary branches peel out from slots in the timber boughs to carry a canopy of ‘London Leaves’.  Alex Haw, director, Atmos (http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/buildings/how-to-build-a-tree-mobile-orchard-by-atmos/8651982.article)

 

 

 

http://www.mobileorchard.info/

http://www.atmosstudio.com/Mobile-Orchard

http://www.treesforcities.org/about-us/20th-birthday/mobile-orchard/