Eastbourne Beach Hut

The beach hut is the result of a design and build competition asking for a monumental response to a very open brief and extremely limited budget! The project manifests itself by placing a large faceted object made with a timber structure clad with translucent Corian Panels between the boardwalk and the beach. The project needed to be adaptable to allow a variety of future uses and public engagement - it can be rented from the council by private individuals as a beach hut or used as a public shelter. Recently it was used as a media hub for Eastbourne’s Annual Airshow, Airbourne. The roof profile is designed to let heat out and light in and at night the hut lights up the beach exposing its structure. The biggest challenge was to deliver the project on budget and so an innovative system of structural nodes was developed to simplify the triangulated timber structure. Each bespoke node is made by connecting aluminium rods to simple 3D printed or aluminium hemispheres using Digital Fabrication Tools. The 3D model exports coordinates for each hemisphere which are screwed together to form a lightweight structural dome which braces the timber structure supporting the cladding.