Flimsy Works led Cabin Fever as a five-day Summer School for STORE Projects, guiding young people through the design and build of a demountable urban log cabin. The doors were developed by Theo Tan and Matt Lucraft and the roof by Manja van de Worp.
Made from 2x2 and 2x8 builders' merchant timber held together only by stained dowels and interlocking joinery, the log cabin adapts a traditional typology to demonstrate how simple and readily available materials can be arranged carefully to make robust structures. Sitting atop concrete blocks strapped together to form a deconstructable footing, the walls have been designed with a cavity to allow columns to be easily inserted and receive a roof.
Students designed reliefs of the landscape of London, prototyped joinery methods and studied uses of structural timber in buildings, with support from Daria Moatazed-Keivani and Seb Birch. They then applied these lessons in a two-day intensive build of a cabin made of dowelled 'logs'.
Designed to be fully demountable, this cabin forms the walls of the STORE Pavilion as a representation of the loadbearing brickwork in the STORE Build project: a small scale building project run as a free education programme in architecture and engineering exploring ways to retrofit London's garages into creative spaces.
The logs were made and assembled together at Rochester Square for the Summer School, then it was taken apart and re-installed as a pavilion at Coal Drops Yard as part of London Design Festival 2024, before it was disassembled and reassembled back again at Rochester Square, where it now operates as a ‘pot shop’... for now.