“A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong.”1

BUNDLE (in this case, twigs) is a number of things considered together. Bundling is also a form of generating strength in numbers (“A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong.”). The Bundle is conceived from the idea of reusing ‘found’ material (twigs, branches, leaf litter) from the Ragdale landscape. The pavilion’s materiality is rooted - literally - in the site of Ragdale and then bundled together and repackaged as ‘The Bundle’ pavilion. The ambition lies with being able to create a spatial and structural stage set derived from a known intelligent structural form - a shell - and making it out of small twigs that when bundled together, are strong enough to form a new type of shell. The majority of the material for the stage set is ‘found’ and brought to Shaw’s Ring and re-formed into a new, artificial 3D landscape.

BUNDLING METHOD FOR STRUCTURE AND ASSEMBLY OF STAGE
The shell structure of Bundle works in compression and uses the the bundles of twigs to gain its strength through quantity and density of the bundling as well as the geometry of the shell form. Each bundle of twigs is bound together with twine. Multiple bundles are bound together against plywood positioning plates with yellow ‘ribbon’ ratchets. The positioning plates combine the bundles into larger parts of the shell surface. The bundles are spaced and stacked incrementally to form the legs of the shell with the top forming an ‘egg-crate’ lattice structure that merges the four legs of bundled twigs together. Tension members (cables), placed diagonally under the raised stage platform, resist outward thrust at the foundation. A temporary scaffold and formwork allows for the placement of the shell surface parts during construction. Once the shell is completed the temporary formwork can be removed.

BUNDLE STRUCTURAL SHELL
A continuous surface comprised of discrete elements (bundles of twigs), construct a shell structure. A shell structure is a constructed system described by curved surfaces and is able to span larger distances while having less thickness due to its strength and rigidity. The external and gravity loads on the shell are transmitted to supports via internal forces acting in the plane of the shell surface. The bundles of twigs as discrete elements form a grid shell structure and carry internal forces. They also provide ‘out of plane bending stiffness’ by the density of the twigs. The out of plane shear and diagonal stiffness to the twig bundles is provided with a strong tie and strap at joints and additional bundles for diagonal bracing.