The Deluxe Group would like to congratulate Heneghan Peng Architects on the Giant’s Causeway Visitors’ Centre’s nomination for the RIBA Sterling Prize 2013.
The Deluxe Group were appointed by Gilbert Ash and Heneghan Peng to provide the bespoke joinery to the Centre in 2011. Internally the design is very stark, angular and minimalist with a palette of natural finishes and timbers. The joinery included reception counters and displays and was laid out on a precise but oblique 78.69o angle and 65.77o grids to provide continuity with the building architecture and the external topography. Each element aligns with other elements for example the fixed furniture set onto the floor space must align to millimetre accuracy with the shutter lines in the concrete wall structures. Additionally the architect required precise joint detailing and intersections for all unitry.
Deluxe’s design and manufacturing teams worked closely with architects Heneghan Peng to develop detailed design and ROD drawings for the joinery. The sharp angles combined with specific jointing details required high level co-ordination between the building structure and the joinery. Using a non-cartesian grid meant that setting out presented complex mathematical challenges to ensure that the required angles, intersections, and reference points where maintained between the elements of the fit-out and from the fit-out back to the construction. There was also considerable development work required to provide the exact colour matches for the natural palette of light bleached oak and anodised aluminium. Additionally the complex feature detailing of the joinery required the precise machining of our inhouse CNC processing centre.
Following design development Deluxe manufactured the joinery at our Portadown workshop and stored the completed units at our consolidation centre well in advance of site installation. With the joinery premanufactured and stored off-site installation was successfully completed out over a short site programme in June 2012.
http://ribastirlingprize.architecture.com/?page_id=8287
The winner declared on Thursday 26 September at an evening event at Central St Martins in London.
