Equitone at Clerkenwell Design Week

Studio Weave, headed by Je Ahn and Maria Smith, designed the pavilion as a way to tap into the area's manufacturing history (one definition of smith is "a worker," such as in a blacksmith). While the workshops and demonstrations held between the walls of the pavilion were the most important ingredient in expressing this idea, the architecture – specifically the grooved fiber cement panels – also played a role, both outside and inside. Fiber cement panels are after all, in the words of Studio Weave, "a material invented by re-appropriating an old paper mill and spinning-machine," therefore a contemporary incarnation of historical crafts.

The exterior was made up of trapezoidal and triangular Equitone panels in the company's Linea profile specially developed for the installation. The vertical, horizontal, and diagonal direction of the grooves cut into the through-colored panels gave the parallel facades their unique texture, while the diagonals in particular paralleled the roof's sawtooth profile that caricatured the larger factories of the area.

Inside, below the sawtooth roof's translucent clerestories, traditional crafts were represented on serrated walls in more fiber cement panels, flat instead of ribbed and full of color in contrast to the gray exterior. Like stained glass windows in a church, these visuals told stories, in line with the workshops that brought crafts to the present day – on the last day of Clerkenwell Design Week the pavilion hosted a 3d-printing demonstration.

A quick glance at Equitone's website reveals primarily rainscreen facade applications, where the fiber cement panels are bonded or mechanically fastened to metal frames. With Smith, Studio Weave worked with structural engineer Webb Yates and fabricator Nicholas Alexander to use the Equitone as a stress skin on a timber frame. The team exploited fiber cement's strong tensile properties by allowing the panels to provide lateral stability for the structural frame. Future applications of Linea might not exploit the material's structural potential, but no doubt in the years to come we will see more architects using the profile for expressive effect.