Air Quality Pavilion: Rethinking Shared Spaces

The Air Quality Pavilion - From concept to fully working prototype

Here is a diagram of the wiring of the Pavilion

Attaching the skylight panel to the roof

Testing the servo for the opening of the Skylight

Adding layers to the Pavilion wall

Testing the large shutter wall

Tests to see if my stepper motors could handle the load.

The flat wall was a lot simpler to create as it wasn’t built up in layers and therefore needed less material. The louvres were smaller & lighter so that a much smaller stepper motor could be used to open and close them. Plus it gave me an opportunity to explore a different way of attaching the louvres to the wall.

I chose to operate the shutter walls with stepper motors, and eventually worked out a way to attach them directly to one of the louvres within the linkage of each of the vertical shutter walls. However, this left me with the problem of how to keep the stepper motor still and secure, without spoiling the aesthetic of the pavilion.

To solve this I created a wooden enclosure for the motor to sit in, which would be attached to the roof of the pavilion. The enclosure was based on a scaled-down version of the pavilion itself. The gaps left between the layers of the enclosure allow air to reach and cool the motor.

The walls of the pavilion were designed to be built up in several layers of plywood, in fact, 30 layers, each 4mm in thickness. I realised that I could only print two complete layers on a single sheet of plywood, which meant I would need too many sheets and would be left with an awful lot of waste material. 

To solve this problem, I broke the layer design down into smaller sections that could be cut out separately and put together like a jigsaw. These smaller pieces could now be fitted more efficiently onto a single sheet of plywood, reducing cost and waste. Being able to print each layer in smaller sections also means I or you could use scrap pieces of laser ply to make up the required amount of layers.