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A collaboration first presented in 2008 by the American Hardwood Export Council and Sir David Adjaye has been successfully showcased as part of an exciting new exhibition at the Design Museum, London. Sclera, originally commissioned for the London Design Festival, was one of seven projects featured in David Adjaye: Making Memory, which ran February 2 to May 5, 2019.

British-Ghanaian architect Sir David Adjaye OBE explored the role of monuments and memorials in the 21st century through seven of his projects. He examined the idea of the monument and presented his thinking on how architecture and form are used as storytelling devices. The exhibition also showed that contemporary monuments are no longer static objects in a field - plaques, statues or neo-classical sculptures - but are dynamic and complex spaces that serve a wider purpose.

“A fragment of the Sclera pavilion was showcased in one of the exhibition rooms. The original Sclera was an elliptical 12 x 8-meter American tulipwood outdoor pavilion located near the river Thames on the Southbank Center Square. Inspired by the human eye, it was an exploration of form and space, and was designed as a public room in the heart of the city that could be simultaneously calming and uplifting - an immersive urban monument about slowing down in order to see and understand the world better,” said Roderick Wiles, AHEC Regional Director.

“Working with tulipwood timber allowed us to really bring out a series of positive and negative forms together. The architecture looks opaque and solid as you approach it, you think it’s a sealed room that dissolves as you enter. You realize that it is a moment where your heightened feeling of light and air are brought into the fore and the visual world is taken away from you,” said Sir David Adjaye.

“I wanted to think about the role of sacred spaces, respite spaces, quiet monuments that played a certain role in our cities and maybe have now become more formal as religious spaces. I wanted to really find a way in which we could make a space that didn’t have the connotations of religion or formal monuments but one that could just allow citizens to retreat from the bustle of everyday life. Timber, such as tulipwood, brings a sense of calm and being amongst nature when surrounded by it,” added Adjaye.

The fragment at the Design Museum, which was replicated following the original drawings by craftsman makers Benchmark, measured 4.5 x 3.4 meters and invited visitors to get a glimpse at what the original experience inside the pavilion was like, and to explore the look and tactility of the tulipwood.

“We are delighted that Sir David Adjaye OBE has selected Sclera as one of the monuments to be included in the Design Museum's exhibition. Sclera was our first structural experiment with American tulipwood, as well as our first collaboration with the London Design Festival. We have since gone on to push the species’ boundaries through research and various other landmark projects with LDF," added David Venables, AHEC European Director.

“Making the Sclera structure for the David Adjaye Show at the Design Museum gave us an opportunity to use American tulipwood at scale and in a really beautiful installation,” said Sean Sutcliffe, founder and MD of Benchmark. “We always welcome the opportunity to make things with tulipwood, not just because it works really well, both machining and handwork are a joy, but significantly because tulipwood is a massively undervalued resource. It is plentiful in the North American forests, fast growing and highly sustainable as a material. It has good strength to weight properties and good stability. Quite why it has been historically so undervalued is a mystery to me, but at this point in time it is a good value hardwood.”

American tulipwood is one of the most prolific hardwood species from the U.S. hardwood forests and is unique to North America. In 2008, American tulipwood had mostly been used for indoor applications, so Adjaye's preference for this species for outdoor use was

significant. Adjaye exploited one of American tulipwood's key characteristics: to create the pavilion’s wooden flooring of extremely long strips set along the greatest length of the ellipse. The extensive stretch of single-piece floorboards accentuates the wood’s varying natural hues, inviting visitors to walk the full length of the pavilion. These regular flooring strips contrasted with the walls and ceiling to bring out the dynamic effect of light filtering onto the wood surfaces