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The museum is built on a hillside and the car parks are steeply terraced. The storage basement for the collections is sunk into one of the terraces giving huge volume with minimal landscape impact. The top of the store forms a large deck covered with a lightweight structure called a gridshell to enclose the building conservation workshop and working space. The gridshell is a lightweight structure made of oak laths and is insulated so that it can be used in comfort year-round.
The building conservation workshop in the Jerwood Gridshell Space The basement store is secure and environmentally controlled and houses the Museum's collections of tools and artefacts from rural life in the region numbering about ten thousand items. Agriculture, domestic life, trades and industries and transport are all represented, and there is a special emphasis on building construction and the building trade. The east end of the basement, the Mitford Foulerton Studio will be devoted to research, documentation and conservation of the collections and will be used by the curator, research and conservation teams and students. The Mitford Foulerton Trust has given generously to the capital cost of the building and gives continuing support to the Museum's provision of training in building conservation. Access to the stores is available on guided tours and by appointment with the curator. The upper part of the building, the Jerwood Gridshell Space, reflecting the Jerwood Foundations generous support, provides a workshop where historic timber-framed buildings can be laid out for conservation and repair. The size of the space allows for large frames to be assembled and it will also be used for the Museum's growing programme of training workshops and the conservation of large objects. The entrance foyer to the building will be used to display parts of the collection in rotation, Gransfors Axes and Books relating to the collection will be on sale and display panels list the Benefactors and Donors to the project and the Awards gained by this innovative building. Building the Downland GridshellA gridshell is a structure with the shape and strength of a double-curvature shell, but made of a grid instead of a solid surface. The grid can be made of any kind of material - steel, aluminium, or even cardboard tubes - but the Downland Gridshell is made of slender oak laths bent into shape. To prepare the oak laths for use all defects were removed and the resulting pieces finger-jointed together into standard lengths of 20 feet (6m). Six of these pieces were then joined to form 120 foot (36m) laths. The diagonal grid of laths was initially formed flat on top of a supporting scaffold. The edges of the grid were then lowered gradually, and the grid bent into shape, until the full shell was formed and secured to the edges of the timber platform above the basement. The grid is actually a double layer, with two laths in each direction. This is necessary in order to combine the required degree of flexibility with sufficient cross section for strength. A fifth layer triangulates the grid to increase its stiffness. The laths are connected at the nodes of the grid with a patented system of steel plates and bolts. The Downland Gridshell is one of a very small number of gridshell structures in Britain, and its design and method of construction are unique. A very high degree of carpentry skill went into its fabrication, emulating but not imitating the traditional framed buildings at the Museum. The workshop area enclosed by the gridshell is known as the Jerwood Gridshell Space to reflect the Jerwood Foundation's generous support of this unique building. More on the Downland Gridshell.....
Awards
More about gridshells.....
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