Sujet
Commonwealth Institute, Kensington High Street, Kensington, London, 06/04/1962. Creator: John Laing plc.
Légende
Commonwealth Institute, Kensington High Street, Kensington, London, 06/04/1962. An interior view of the upper gallery in the Commonwealth Institute exhibition hall showing the beams of the outer roof sections. Laing built the Commonwealth Institute between October 1960 and October 1962 to replace the former Imperial Institute that was to be demolished to make way for new facilities at Imperial College. The building consisted of a four-storey administrative block housing a library, restaurant, board room and conference hall and a separate two-storey block containing a cinema with an art gallery above, but the focus of the project was the exhibition hall with its hyperbolic paraboloid roof, the first of its kind constructed in Great Britain. The exhibition, designed by James Gardner, provided spaces where each of the Commonwealth nations could showcase their achievements and characteristics, primarily to school children as teaching aids to enliven history and geography lessons. The shell arch of the central roof section was of reinforced concrete, cast in situ using timber formwork with rough sawn boards to provide a textured internal surface whilst the four outer "warps" were constructed using precast beams and wood wool slabs, blocks of shredded timber bound together in a cement paste and left visible from the interior. The entire roof was then clad in copper sheeting over a layer of vermiculite. It covers an area of 33,700sqft, 183 feet square with the central section 93 feet square and ranges between 30ft high at its lowest and 80ft at the peaks.
Date
1962
Crédit
Photo12/Heritage Images/Historic England
Notre référence
HRM22A00_075
Model release
Non
Property release
Non
Licence
Droits gérés
Format disponible
64,1Mo (1,7Mo) / 47,4cm x 33,9cm / 5597 x 4006 (300dpi)