Structural Designer
Arup
Client Name
Hull City Council
Location
Kingston-upon-Hull, United Kingdom
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Judge's comment: The sculpture is built as a 4mm thick stressed skin of stainless steel. This innovative approach to design and building learns from nature, using curvature, corrugation and distortion to add strength. The base is only 900mm wide. At design gateways the design team resisted advice to revert to a skeleton structure that was clad. The purity of the stressed skin was maintained: the artwork and structure are one. The Arup team have delivered far more than the artistic brief pertaining to sunlight passing through pairs of apertures at specific times and dates. They have taken something that could have been satisfactory and turned it into something coherent and unique.
Judge's comment: