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Watch the Endless Stair come to life in front of the Tate Modern
‘Stairs are sculpture’s gift to architecture,’ muses director of dRMM Professor Alex de Rijke, a sentiment that inspired the London-based firm in its ambitious endeavor for the London Design Festival. Freshly unveiled as this year’s landmark project, the ‘Endless Stair’ installation will take pride of place in front of the Tate Modern until October.
The playful Escher-esque structure consists of interlocking flights of wooden stairs that can be infinitely reconfigured. The groundbreaking installation, created in collaboration with the American Hardwood Export Council and Arup, also pushes the limits of hardwood in construction, with this being the first project of its kind to use American tulipwood cross-laminated timber (CLT).
From conception, the architects were adamant on ‘not following the rules’, and the undertaking certainly threw up its share of challenges. De Rijke explains, ‘Computers are awful at predicting the most crucial points: scale, weight, and gravity. It was impossible to imagine the 3D form of the stairs on a screen.’ It took three months of ceaseless model-making before the design was perfected, and production could begin.
The CLT panels were first produced in Italy, where timber specialist Imola Legno cut, planed and finger-jointed the lumber into sheets, before gluing them together. These were then transported to Switzerland to be assembled into separate flights by Nüssli, a global supplier of temporary structures for events, trade fairs and exhibitions, before they completed the final leg of the trip to London.
The highest step of the installation peaks at a dizzying 7.7 metres above ground (roughly three storeys), complete with a crystal clear Perspex railing for steel-nerved visitors daring enough to venture to its edge. By night, the structure will be illuminated in a special lighting scheme devised by Seam and Lumenpulse. At the end of its stay, the Endless Stair will be dismantled and individual flights transferred to new homes.
The American tulipwood cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels - created in Italy by timber specialist Imola Legno - are transported to Nüssli's headquarters in Switzerland to be assembled into separate flights for the Endless Stair structure
A Nüssli carpenter sands the edges of the panels by hand to smooth and round them
The treated CLT panels are fed through a router to carve out the intricate finger joints
They are then run through a sanding machine twice, to smooth its grain on both sides
The routed panel edges are brushed with glue, to be slotted together to form one tread element
The routed panel edges are brushed with glue, to be slotted together to form one tread element
Treads are stacked, ready to be assembled into a flight
Technical sketches of the Endless Stair in the workshop
A test flight of one of the fifteen flights that will form the installation
This prototype flight was load-tested at the factory using steel weights
The assembled flights ready to be transported to London to form the final Endless Stair structure
ADDRESS
Tate Modern
Bankside SE1 9TG