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Bat House blog

25 August 2009

 

24 August 2009

Mastic/sealant (01)

 

23 August 2009

View from across the lake (01)

 

22 August 2009

The roof (01)

 

4 August 2009

-Posted by Jorgen Tandberg

Roosting panels (02)

The roosting panels arrive on site in overloaded van – more than a ton of CNC-cut plywood. They will be stored in a tent before and after surface treatment, until the lime render on the walls of the Bat House is dry enough for them to be fastened.

25 July  2009

-Posted by Jorgen Tandberg

Roosting panels (01)

The front and back façade is covered with more than 100m2 of CNC-cut ply wood panels. CNC is short for Computer Numerical Controlled, meaning the cutting out of the wood patterns is completely digitally controlled. A large drill runs CAD software, and cuts the patterns into the wood panels, which in this case have a thickness of 24mm.

A number of tests have been done to make sure this will be successful – CNC cutting is a technique usually reserved for furniture and small-scale prototypes, and not for façades, as will be the case for the Bat House. The images show a small-scale model of a façade in card, and a 2 metre long sample in plywood, lying on the cutting bed of the CNC machine.

Bat features (02)

The bat boxes inside are also starting to come in place – they consist of ply panels with spacers so the Pipistrelles can climb down and roost between them.

Here I am discussing the drawings with the site manager from Rise (contractor).

 

Materials and construction (02)

The timber and hemcrete walls have been covered with the first layer of sustainable lime render, giving the building a very different look! The render will be put on in three coats, with an extensive drying period between.

 

20 July 2009

-Posted by Jorgen Tandberg

Materials and construction (01)

The white box was to create a contrast to its surroundings in shape and colour, but its material quality had to be pleasant up close – ‘mineral’, rather than ‘plastic’ were terms used to describe it.

After long discussions within the design team, we soon ended up with two possibilities, both with pros and cons.

A) A ‘shell’ in a white pre-cast, low-cement concrete with large amounts of recycled material.

B) An infill solution, with a timber frame, ‘Hemcrete’ wall infill, and lime render to provide the preferred surface texture and look.

The latter was preferred, in the end, due to the material’s sustainability record, and the general signals it would send out as a construction method. Hemcrete is a material somewhere between concrete and wood – wooden particles are connected with a fluid ‘binder’, trapping CO2 inside.

The images below show the building in several stages of completion:

01) Foundations have been constructed, and partners are visiting the site. Jeremy Deller and Kevin Peberdy of the Wetlands Trust as most noticeably ‘fire marshals’.

02) The timber frame is up. Notice the water below the house, where Daubenton’s Bats can fly in, and the rafters in the ceiling, between which Pipistrelles can roost.

03) Hemcrete, has been cast in between the wall posts, with re-usable plastic shuttering.

04) The shuttering is removed, and the Hemcrete is curing. In a few weeks, it will be covered with a sustainable lime render.

 

 25th June 2009

- Posted by Jorgen Tandberg

Bat features (01)

The building proposal was shaped as a picture in a frame – where the plain, artificial-looking, white ‘frame’, originally intended as concrete, would separate the fantastic realm of representation inside, from the ‘real’ world which it depicted, on the outside.

Our intention was that the bats would roost inside the fretted wood panels covering one façade. The layering of carved 2D panels, originally created digitally by overlaying photographs, would create cavities of all shapes and sizes, for the bats to roost within – a sort of organized chaos, that would inevitably create enough variation that the bats would find suitable roosting and breeding spaces.

Following the advice and guidance of the bat experts, this was expanded upon, to create a larger void inside the box, which would help maintain a constant temperature.

The bat house is now generally designed for two species of bats, the two species most commonly found in the area: the Soprano Pipistrelle, and the Daubenton’s bat.

Four main ‘areas’ within the building could be recognized, that the bats would inhabit:

1. The carved wood panels (now covering two façades, rather than one, to account for the two main views of the building: from across the lake the bat house is bordering, and from the path on which you approach the house)
2. The roof structure, which would be re-designed to allow Pipistrelle bats (often found in roofs and lofts) to crawl as far up to the ceiling as possible inside the house.
3. The larger void below the roof structure, behind the carved wood panels. This would contain larger roosting boxes, shaped as layered panels, allowing Pipistrelle bats to crawl downwards from the ceiling on a hot day. This void ends with a raised maintenance floor inside the house.
4. A space for Daubenton’s bats, below the maintenance floor, raised above water.

 

June 2009

- Posted by Jorgen Tandberg

Introduction

During the summer of 2007 I received an email from Kevin Peberdy of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, about the Bat House Project. My girlfriend, Yo Murata, and myself, both architecture students, had entered the competition to design the ‘Bat House’ in 2006; an RIBA competition initiated by the artist Jeremy Deller, whose film ‘Memory Bucket’ had gained him the Turner Prize and an unusual interest in bats.

The brief: to design a home for the thousands of ‘homeless’ bats in and around the London Wetland Centre. The ambiguous nature of the idea was what part of what sparked our interest – a man-made shelter for wild animals.

After our unexpected competition-win, approximately a year of mobilization followed. Funding needed to be raised, the right people needed to be approached and convinced to get involved (at this time, both Yo and I were in school; unaware of what was going on, we considered the project to be at a halt).

The team that volunteered to work on the project could not have been better –at the time of our own assignment, Cahal Doris and Ed Hoare from Arup had already committed to work on the project as structural engineers and sustainability experts. One of my teachers from university, George Legendre of IJP Corporation, assumed the role of delivery architect, and would help us bring the project to completion. Peter Shepherd of the ecological consultancy agency Baker Shepherd Gillespie donated a large amount of hours to the development of the project, as did bat expert Mike Waite. Finally, Jack Roberts of the quantity surveyor firm Davis Langdon, and the people of the Wetlands Trust (Kevin Peberdy, Stephanie Fudge, Martin Senior, John Arbon) would all play major roles in executing the tiny building scheme.

Undoubtedly, the scheme’s adaptability had played a role in getting people involved. Without drastically altering the design, bat experts could implement the desired bat features, and the engineers could try out techniques for sustainable building. Yo and I were allowed the pleasure of building a 4 meter tall white box in the forest.

 

April 2007

- posted by Jeremy Deller

Over Easter weekend I visited the largest Horseshoe Bat roost in the UK in Devon - the exact location isn't widely known in the interests of protecting it. Over 2,000 bats live there. Even though early in the season, about 50 bats emerged to go hunting at dusk. The Horseshoe is the biggest bat in Britain. It's vulnerable to birds of prey which is why it's very cautious, avoiding daylight. The sounds that came through our bat detectors were musical, almost bird-like.

The photographs are of two dead dessicated bats, found by the ranger. They remained in a sleeping or hibernating position so could still hang off my finger.

5 March 2007

- posted by Jeremy Deller

One Saturday in mid-February I gave a talk at the London Wetlands Centre to an audience mainly of families and kids. We were accompanied by a live serotine bat, Sid is employed by the Bat Conservation trust as a show bat as he injured himself and can’t fly.

After the talk and bat show the audience got to work building models of possible bathouses, using cardboard, sellotape, string, lego pieces etc.

Bat House models done by children during a workshop at London Wetland Centre on 17 February, 2007.

See more images from the workshop here.

11 January 2007

- posted by Jeremy Deller

                                      

Sid

There was a presentation about the project during a conference on Art and Ecology organised by the Royal Society of Arts just before Christmas. I spoke for a few minutes as did Katie Parsons from the Bat Conservation Trust, but the highlight was an appearance by a serotine bat called Sid who is used for educational events by the BCT, as he is unable to fly due to a broken wing that healed awkwardly. As he is so small (only about 3 inches long) we filmed and simultaneously projected his image onto a screen so everyone could see him, it worked really well. Though I was not allowed to handle him directly, I did hold him when he was wrapped up in a cloth which was quite amazing as you can feel him purring.

For some strange reason I was invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace just before Christmas. I took my mother who was very excited about this, probably a little too excited, anyway, the reception was attended by 600 or so people and was held in a very grand series of interconnecting rooms that were specifically designed for the purposes of entertaining, the doors were mirrored so it became spatially very confusing. My mother was determined to meet HMQ and ended up chatting to her for a minute or so where she mentioned the Bat House competition - not sure what the Queen made of it but I'm confident that I'll receive a drawing soon.

 

12 December 06

- posted by Jeremy Deller

In 2003 I went to Texas where I made a film about that state and some of its inhabitants. The end of the film featured a natural phenomenon of 3 million bats leaving a mine shaft. They fly a mile up into the atmosphere to catch millions of moths being transported by thermal air currents. It was not a conventional end to a documentary as I felt the film needed to be cleansed or at least taken to another place. (Some of this footage is on the home page here.) Certain landowners in Texas have excavated their own artificial caves to provide habitats for these mammals and there is a history of bat conservation and cultivation in Texas as bats are seen as a good defence against mosquitoes and other insect pests.

It’s not just caves that bats like, they often take to buildings - most famously in Austin,Texas, they use a bridge as a habitat and their nightly forays have become a major tourist attraction. This got me thinking about designing a public sculpture that would also be a home for bats in the UK and an art work and this idea progressed to a wider project to design a bat house for urban bats that can accomodate different species and their needs, which is what this site is all about.

My motives are pretty straightforward. London is not the most hospitable place for any creature and housing is a high priority in determining quality of life and survival. Bat numbers are always under pressure as more building and development threatens their natural and unnatural habitats. They like to roost in roof spaces that now are becoming converted and in the bits of buildings that are seen as faulty, ie small gaps between bricks.

Anyway, welcome to the site and I hope the design that we finally choose will be a thing of beauty as well as a practical object.

Image: Still from Jeremy Deller's Memory Bucket 2003,
Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow.

May 06

- posted by Jeremy Deller

Jeremy Deller and Katie Parsons, from the Bat Conservation Trust, leading a Bat Walk at the WWT London Wetland Centre. Image by Tue Greenfort