The Carbon Fiber bridge was commissioned for a private residence to connect the main house to the garage across a gully. The bridge avoids directly impacting the local fauna by cantilevering 50’ from the patio structure like a diving board, requiring no additional support anywhere along its span. Installation access was another constraint due to the winding roads of the Berkeley hills and difficulties with getting any kind of equipment to the site. The bridge was made in three pieces, each light enough to be carried by hand, and then bolted together on site.

Boathouse Pavilion is an assembly of all FRP monocoque structural panels supported by an array of steel columns. It is located at Gathering Place Park in Tulsa OK on the banks of the Arkansas River. The pavilion roof consists of 130 unique all FRP panels structurally joined to one another and supported by steel columns. The FRP surface area totals 20,000 ft2 of actual material, counting the inner and outer surface of the panels and all of the return flanges). A grid of columns supports them, and the typical span is about 20′.

K&A fabricated the nine primary acoustic surfaces (aka “Sails”) on the interior of the Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University, as well as the (nearly) elliptical ceiling (aka “Cloud”). The Sails range in size from 26′ x 26′ up to 35′ x 50′, and the Cloud’s maximum length is 130′. All surfaces have compound curvature, and the Cloud has a complex sinusoidal surface articulation.

From the artist’s concept model, Floating Peel’s geometry was captured by a laser scanner, foam patterns fabricated in full-scale and female FRP molds made of the tops and bottoms of each Peel and the remaining portion of the fruit. Due to the extremely small ground contact point, the laminate is carbon fiber in vinyl ester resin. Fabrication utilized a unique interleafing of thin ribbons of ¼-inch-thick by 1-inch-wide 5-pound per cubic foot PVC foam core. As a result, the laminate is nearly solid carbon fiber at the bottom, with the carbon gradually being replaced by foam slivers. The top leaves are approximately 1.5mm (.060 inches) thick with solid foam between skins.

Flying Pins is one of 15 large scale projects fabricated by K&A for the artists’ Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The pins seem to fly through the air but employ an innovative steel structure with slip-together invisible connections.