project

Imperial War Museum Duxford, AirSpace – 225m Printed Stretch Fabric "Flight Path" Ribbon

Membrane
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General information

  • Home page
    https://www.architen.com/projects/imperial-war-museum-duxford/
  • Location address
    Imperial War Museum Duxford, Cambridgeshire, UK
  • Location country
    United Kingdom
  • Name of the client/building owner
    Trustees of the Imperial War Museum
  • Function of building
    Exhibition
  • Degree of enclosure
    Fully enclosed structure
  • Type of application of the membrane
    internal
  • Primary function of the tensile structure
    • Space defining elements

Description

As part of the £25 million AirSpace development at Imperial War Museum Duxford, a former RAF fighter station that now houses one of the world's leading collections of historic aircraft, Architen Landrell won the contract to install the Flight Path: a 225m-long tensioned fabric ribbon that runs through the new exhibition hangar.

The Flight Path does far more than decorate. It leads visitors through the exhibition, carries large printed graphics, acts as a projection screen for audio-visual presentations and as a backdrop for effects lighting, and helps define distinct zones within the hangar, giving each area a sense of enclosure and a surface for displaying information or aircraft components.

The ribbon is 1.8m wide and twists and undulates in three dimensions. It starts at the main entrance on the ground floor, rises up the stairway to the main exhibition level, and then performs its own aerobatic manoeuvres along the length of the first-floor gallery, echoing the aircraft displayed around it.

To achieve a perfectly smooth, continuous surface through these changes in direction, the fabric needed to be as malleable as possible. A Lycra-based stretch fabric was dyed and printed with aircraft silhouettes, made up into long sleeves, or socks, and stretched over a shaped steel frame.

Client/building owner: Trustees of the Imperial War Museum. Stretch fabric design, fabrication and installation: Architen Landrell.

Description of the environmental conditions

Internal installation within a large museum exhibition hangar, protected from the weather. The printed stretch fabric ribbon provides wayfinding, graphics, a projection surface and spatial definition.

Material of the cover

  • Cable-net/Fabric/Hybrid/Foil
    Fabric
  • Type (code)
    Stretch Fabric

Main dimensions and form

Duration of use

  • Temporary or permanent structure
    Permanent

Involved companies

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