Kerto showcased at Summer Exhibition
4 June 2012Engineered timber from Metsä Wood has a starring role at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.
Visitors to this year's event will be greeted by "From Landscape to Portrait", an installation, largely rendered in Kerto Q LVL, in the Annenburg Courtyard, which leads to the main entrance.
The installation comprises a sequence of 11 huge Kerto frames, each 5x3m and weighing around 230 kilos, which wind their way along a sine curve, each frozen through a 90 degree rotation from a landscape to a portrait position.
The frames are suppported and 'braced' by concealed engineering - the rotated corner angle has an L-shaped steel flitch plate seated with a routed out section and then hidden behind another layer of Kerto.
Architect Chris Wilkinson, of Wilkinson Eyre Architects, who was commissioned to produce the piece, said that timber was the material of choice from the outset as it suited the 'narrative', emulating wooden picture frames. And Kerto's dimensional stability, plus its strength to weight ratio meant the installation would be robust, yet slender.
"Metsä Wood Kerto LVL panels allowed for surprisingly light sections over a large span whilst providing an elegant and sustainable solution to the integral timber frames," said Mr Wilkinson.
His son, fellow architect Dominic Wilkinson, who was responsible for the delivery of the project, added that the fact that the frames were pre-fabricated to precision tolerances at Metsä Wood's manufacturing centre in Aichach, Germany, made installation much more straightforward.
Metsä Wood's UK head of marketing, Marcus Sanders, said the company "jumped at" the opportunity to be involved with the project.
"Kerto is becoming more and more popular with architects and specifiers and Chris's installation really demonstrates its versatility and dimensional stability," he said.
To see timelapse photography of the construction process visit www.landscapetoportrait.co.uk
