Little Saigon Welcome Arch
- Architect: McBride Charles Ryan
- Builder: MouldCAM
- Product: ShapeShell™-RT
- Area: -
- Application: Public Artwork
- Responsibility: Design, Engineer & Manufacture of Feature Elements
Details
The Little Saigon Welcome Arch was developed by MCR as an entranceway to a culturally Vietnamese district in Melbourne. The structure consists of a pair of Vietnamese Lac Bird sculptures. The birds are approximately 9m high and cantilever over the road 5m each. The birds were made of a glass-carbon hybrid composite material, fixed into precast plinths. ShapeShift were involved in the design, engineering, documentation, certification and installation of the structure.
This project was initially specified as a clad steel structure by Bollinger + Grohmann. ShapeShift tech. presented an elegant solution using ShapeShell-RT for the structure that added significant economic and quality benefits to the structure and hence we were awarded the contract.
ShapeShift Technologies completed a detailed structural engineering report with supplementary documentation to certify the complex structure. The installation was also completed with ShapeShift’s scope. Given the complexity of the surface finish, the structure was painted on-site and all joints were faired to provide a seamless finish to the sculpture.