Every year, as many native plant species go dormant for the winter, Austin’s Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center comes alive in a different way: Eight one-of-a-kind forts are erected for its Fortlandia installation.
The forts are meant to connect kids and adults to the natural environment through playfulness and curiosity. The climbable, playable, interactive art pieces opened to the public today and will be there until early February.
When my wife, Nicolette, asked if I wanted to help her build one of these forts, I said, “sure, that sounds like fun.” And while it has been fun, it’s also been a massive undertaking.
Nicolette is an interior designer at STG Design, where at least a dozen designers and architects have been involved in the process – as well as engineers and a high-tech fabricator.
Our fort is called Honeycomb Hideout. It’s a human-sized beehive made of sixty hexagonal honeycombs that are each three feet across. And there are three abstract flowers around the beehive. This thing is huge.
One of the STG designers on the project, Georgina Cantu, said the Wildflower Center’s efforts to educate kids about pollination inspired the design.
“The idea is that the kids are actually the bee, so they can go from the flowers and then through the beehive, and that is how pollination actually works,” Cantu said.
While most of the design was created with computer-aided drafting, or CAD, programs, the team also got input from some STG employees’ children. They brought a prototype hexagon to the office and encouraged the kids to climb and play on it. Some of the children drew pictures of how they envisioned the fort.
Nine-year-old Elliot Hirsch, the son of STG architect Brett Hirsch, gave the team some feedback on the design.
Architect Brett Hirsch and his son Elliot pose for a portrait next to a prototype hexagon fort component at Andalusia Design on Sept. 14.
Patrick M. Davis / Texas Standard
“I drew some pictures, and I was just trying to make adjustments to the fort,” Elliot said.
Brett said their family goes to Fortlandia every year and he jumped at the chance to help build one of the forts. He and Cantu both said this project is special to them because it is for the community to enjoy, not just a specific client.
“It’s a good way to get outside of the day-to-day world of architecture and do something fun for the community and see the real-world impact,” Brett said.
Making a fort also gets a lot of eyes on your company. Andalusia Design collaborated with STG on the Honeycomb Hideout, and the company’s co-founder, Matt Blakeley, said that was a draw for him.
“We’re relatively new to Austin, as a company,” Blakeley said. “For us, part of this is developing close relationships and showing that we can work together with a design firm to deliver something special.”
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When the folks at Andalusia received STG’s CAD models, they got busy figuring out how to fabricate the fort’s components.
“We got those translated into something that can be produced and structurally sound,” Blakeley said. “And so really a sprint over the last month by my co-founder, Pete Ogden, to get all this staged and ready to go.”
With their automated CNC machinery, Andalusia cut wood panels for the hexagon frames and fabricated the metal brackets that hold them together. After Andalusia’s machines did as much of the heavy lifting as possible, it was time for the hand work to begin.
Volunteers from STG, Andalusia and Dunaway Engineering met on a Saturday to assemble the 60 hexagons, setting up stations for gluing and drilling the various pieces together. It was a bit like an extra credit project with people finding time to work on it on top of their usual workload. But architect Brett Hirsch says he’s been grateful to be a part of it.
“We’re thrilled that we got to be included in the design,” he said. “And really proud of the team for putting together all the extra work and effort to draw this thing, model it up and come here during the weekend to spend their own time to build it.”
But out of everyone on the team, 9-year-old Elliot Hirsch might be the most excited about seeing the Honeycomb Hideout completed.
“Yeah, it’s gonna be like a beehive, and I’m gonna be a bee just buzzing around on it,” he said with a chuckle.
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