3D Printed Garden Pavilion

As part of our ongoing material research and integrated technology approach, Heta were recently commissioned to design and produce a net zero 3D-fabricated live-work pavilion, for a home garden or similar site condition.

The site context for the pavilion dictated an approach that was sustainable, re-useable and in some way of the earth. Through initial research and testing we developed a 3d printed component solution, with clay-earth materials as a medium, and a hybrid method of part in-situ element combined with prefabricated off-site elements.

Project Details

Category: Architecture / Sustainability / Future
Site: London, U.K
Client / Sponsor: Confidential
Status: 2022- Ongoing

Additive manufacture to build at scale

Several design options were explored using combinations of components of varying scale to investigate hylomorphic forms that presented themselves via the various fabrication and delivery methods. The time and logistical constraints of the off-site production and delivery quickly became a sorting factor that informed the evolution and optimisation of the designs.

Through research and testing with experts and fabrication practitioners in the field, the 3D printed clay elements were hybridised with sustainably sourced timber components, where it was not practical or structurally efficient to utilise only 3D printed parts of the enclosure. To form a natural material enclosure.

Realising highly detailed computer models

The advantages the 3D printing components gave allowed us to create lacework forms of interconnected nodes, where reticulated surfaces gave further layered purpose to its use, as the brief called for a pavilion that was integrated into the landscape and garden setting. Ultimately permitting the green surface to come up out of the ground woven into the structure.

This allowed a growth medium for climbing and anchoring plants within the fabricated nodes of the mesh like enclosure, acting as literal growth planters, to gradually colonise. This blending with the natural context and vegetation, to be truly of the earth connected to its setting, whilst over time the clay form components can dissolve into the earth leaving the timber structural elements in place for future re-use and repurposing of new enclosures.