Speaker: Max Clayton, Winner of the Nethercot Prize 2024, IABSE British Group.
Moderator: David Knight, Chair, IABSE British Group
The 2024 Nethercot Prize winner Max Clayton will give a webinar on his paper outlining the design and construction of Fern the Diplodocus.
In the gardens of the Natural History Museum, a new resident stands tall over the Jurassic vegetation. Over the past four years, Structure Workshop has collaborated with scientists at the Natural History Museum and Madrid-based art fabricators Factum Arte to design and make the world’s first and only post-tensioned bronze dinosaur. Based on Dippy, the Museum’s famous and much-loved Diplodocus cast, the new attraction is a free-standing, 25m long, life-size bronze dinosaur. Newly named Fern, it was officially unveiled in July 2024 in the revamped museum gardens as part of the Urban Nature Project, which has transformed the gardens into a biodiverse green space. The living dinosaur was an engineering marvel: an incredibly elegant and efficient natural structure. The neck and tail cantilevers are held aloft by thick, strong ligaments under great tension, running along the spine and anchored back to the hip. In the final design, each bone is a separate hollow casting, and they form the primary structural elements. The vertebrae are held together with stainless steel structural ‘tendons’ running along the spine. The tendons have been posttensioned to compress the bronze, holding the separate vertebrae together and forming the main structural spine. Just like the real animal, the tendons are anchored to the hip bone, and the two cantilevers largely balance each other. Read further …
Client: The Natural History Museum, London.
Fabrication and digital mediation: Factum Arte.
Founders: Fademesa.
Structural Engineering: Structure Workshop.
Fern the Diplodocus is supported by Kusuma Trust.