The complex architectural challenges of turning a simple idea – solidifying the motion of a joyfully cartwheeling aircraft - to create Slipstream were twofold: Generating the shape of the form, and designing the construction model – the vast kit-of-parts jigsaw of pieces which comprise the sculpture.
For 'Slipstream', a Richard Wilson artwork in the new T2A terminal building at Heathrow, the fantastic trajectory of a tumbling light aircraft is revealed in a 76m long volume of twisting, undulating material. The architect was responsible for taking this idea, and creating a design which fulfilled the requirements of structure, buildability, procurement, and aesthetics. In order to achieve this, two principle interrelated challenges were addressed; generation of the form, and creation of the fabrication model and its associated drawings/CNC information. Multiple innovative processes were required to achieve these aims. phase 1 - Form generation The so-called 'swept volume' of the aircraft as it moves was generated using an approach which gave a result composed of higher-class surfaces. Existing approaches to calculation of swept volumes typically result in a discretised mesh*. Therefore a novel method for creating the form in a suitable topology was authored from first principles.

phase 2 - Fabrication model The Slipstream sculpture was created as a giant, 25,000 piece interlocking, 'self-jigging' jigsaw kit. Similar in many ways to the car or aerospace industry no two parts are alike, however this sculpture is a one-off: the economies of scale from those sectors are not present. To offset this, custom scripts and intelligent parametric modelling programmatically generated over 25,000 dissimilar components, along with the positions of half a million rivets on the sculptures' surface. Each component, and every rivet, was automatically assigned a unique ID, derived from the large dataset of points, lines and splines which generated the original form.