The Fourth Day of the Design Week was spent in the Margam Discovery Centre working up the three successful schemes into a finalised set of working drawings and 1:20 scale model. While the stakeholders the night before said they could happily take any of the nine schemes, for the purposes of the week and the summer school, concentrating on three designs allowed the students to think about the practicalities and building details of their groups' design so as it could be built in by the Craft Apprentices on the Live Design Build scheduled for the 27th September - 22nd October this year. As well as this each group had to think about materials, sourcing, structural details and connections, site preparation, access and the feasibility of the build.
Expert engineers and architects from the University of Wales and Coed Cymru arrived in the afternoon to help the groups with some of the structural elements of their designs. Earlier in the week they introduced a new timber structuring system called Ty-Unnos which stands for 'build in one night'. The system strengthens the widely available timber in Wales called sitka spruce, which is otherwise unusable in the majority of building construction. Whilst the students explored the idea of using this new Welsh system in their designs, the experts assisted with any other structural details that the groups were working.
As competition was building up into the evening, the model building and drawing carried on into the early hours. And of course in the spirit of the theme given to the summer school it was only fitting that the students sampled some of the finest Welsh ale and whiskey from the area, if anything but to get the creative juices going....
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