The Mobile Orchard is a new public installation designed by atmos – an inhabitable hymn to the urban fruit tree, commissioned as the centrepiece for the City of London Festival. Its exuberant design celebrates the wonder of trees, and offers a magical mutation – a welcoming structure tailored to humans. We were brought in to rationalise the fabrication process and get it built!

The City of London Festival commissioned the Mobile Orchard for 2013 as part of an ongoing objective to raise awareness of environmental issues through artistic responses to the natural world. Alongside the manufactured tree at the Mobile Orchard’s centre, sixty four real trees, donated by the Worshipful Company of Fruiterers, will travel with it around the City. After the Festival twelve of these will be planted at Middlesex Street Estate to form the City of London’s first community orchard; the remainder will be distributed to schools around the capital. The sculpture itself will be gifted to the Festival’s partner charity Trees for Cities as part of their 20th anniversary celebrations and will continue to be used around the country.

Nicholas Alexander was brought on to handle the fabrication of the ambitious Mobile Orchard. Given our extensive experience of unusual and exciting one-off constructions, and in-house digital fabrication capabilities, we were an obvious choice! Rationalising the build process of such a complex object was the main role for the company – taking what is theoretical in a set of drawings and turning this into an organised and buildable set of components. Given the tight budget and vast amount of labour necessary to complete the fabrication, Nicholas Alexander organised and welcomed into their workshop a diverse group of volunteers of varying skill levels. Everyone had in abundance an enthusiasm and a passion to work together, learning new skills from the team at Nicholas Alexander and seeing the tree develop and grow over the course of a few weeks.

From the architects: It centers on a large, sculptural timber oasis that doubles as immersive summer street furniture – morphing into seating, shelter, stairway and sky-throne. Its undulating roots offer a landscape for lounging, including sinuous benches and molten armchairs that cradle the gaze upwards through the hollow trunk.Massive branches worm outwards to offer further seats, and splay to form fluid steps that lead to a branch-clad throne at the tip of the trunk.A lightweight latticework of aluminium unfurls from the laminated plywood grains to support a canopy of lasercut leaves – each blade a local London borough, with the Host borough further subdivided into wards – the blossom and seeds of the project.Electric LED lighting threads through its veins, uniting base and crown, their sinuous lines like section-cuts that graphically describe the segments of its core geometry, terminating in glowing bulbs of moon-light spots.

The installation is edible – cradling a constellation of real apples, refreshed daily, that are ripe for the plucking by any member of the public. It is accompanied by a choir of young fruit trees that, like the modular nature of the tree itself, will grow over time, awaiting a future in schools and orchards across London.It will host a series of events and performances, including specially-commissioned theatre and music, a Fruit-Feast dinner and an Urban Picnic of gleaned fruit and veg from the team at Feeding the 5,000. The project seeks to create a new kind of public landscape that merges the best of man-made design and organic nature. It offers a labyrinth of complex, intriguing, generous spaces that seek to nourish all the senses – celebrating both natural trees, and the communion of cities.

We worked with Studio Xag to create a series of 4 animated shop window displays and a pop-up store for Christian Louboutin in Selfridges. We built a zoetrope of counterbalanced, rotating legs as the main piece, as well as cladding various display stands and cabinets for the interior and cutting bespoke anniversary archways. We worked in partnership with Studio Xag on the whole project – our team created the structures and various mechanisms based on their design, and they produced the graphics and artwork with Verve Display. Our 2 install teams came together at the end to fit the whole project.

We were delighted to find out that part of the installation, a pair of mechanical scissoring legs, was then chosen for display at the Design Museum as part of a Louboutin retrospective.

Nicholas Alexander worked with Campaign Design and M&C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment to create The Havana Club Mojito Embassy.

The Embassy’s ‘Mojito Market’ forms the heart of the bar, encouraging guests to gather their own fresh ingredients from street trolleys piled high with mint and lime. After stocking up on ingredients, a team of Havana Club bartenders guides them through the art of making Cuban mojitos.

We were tasked with developing and fabricating a set of components so that on site, the install would create a seamless, whole experience. Given the particular atmosphere Havana wanted to create, we were able to employ our skills in specialist finishing techniques to create hand painted signage alongside distressed, stained timber joinery elements and bespoke steel framing.

As well as the fabrication itself, we also handled the touring and associated logistics and the installation into different venues, each with their own challenges. On site our team were able to make appropriate adjustments whilst working with local crew to ensure that the Embassy became a part of the fabric of each building it visited.

The pop-up event will be touring throughout Europe in the summer of 2013 after initial events in Milan, Edinburgh and Lisbon last year.

Nicholas Alexander was approached by Fever PR to take on the challenge of floating a 50ft inflatable rubber duck along the river Thames for online bingo brand – Jackpotjoy.com

We were hired for our extensive experience of delivering complex and large scale projects in a challenging environment. Initially, we acted as consultants to develop a viable plan for delivery which we ourselves then carried out.

The duck was a test of our risk management and problem solving abilities and saw us visiting Leavesden film studios (the only sufficiently large indoor space) to test run the inflation and structural support of the duck before she set sail on a beautiful December’s day. The high-risk scheme was delivered flawlessly and received much media attention – the perfect project!

To celebrate Guinness’s 250th anniversary we worked with Jump Studios to create a bespoke submarine/bar which navigated its way to the depths of the Baltic around the Stockholm Archipelago in Sweden.

It took a lot of research to find a set of specifications we ought to be working to – finally settling on the American standards for submersible vessels. This led our choice of materials, using an advanced fire retardant and low de-gassing GRP.

We then surveyed the interior of the sub, paying extra attention to the two small access hatches we were going to have to pass all the interior components through! We knew that we would have to basically fit a ship in a bottle, so we set about making a mock-up of both the interior of the vessel and a hatch to test out passing all the parts through safely.

From our plans and cross sections, Jump studios produced designs for a series of different sectional elements which produced the interior and all the functionality required for the event. We then added in the provision for necessary services, air supplies, lighting and emergency access to oxygen masks, before producing a set of CNC cut moulds.

We installed all the interior components in Sweden in arctic conditions on the dockside over a 6 day period. The sub was launched a few weeks later for sea trials before the main event which saw completion winners enjoying a pint of Guinness deep below the surface!

Nicholas Alexander worked in collaboration with designer Alexander Mulligan to create a site-specific installation, at J+A Cafe during Clerkenwell Design Week, May 2013, and into June.

J+A Café’s outdoor courtyard area would have once been a busy thoroughfare for cattle en-route to Smithfield market. We responded to this old area of London and the history behind its ancient Drovers by designing an architectural structure that illustrates the narrative, movement and energy which would have existed on those grounds many years ago.

For Gamescom 2009 Nicholas Alexander co-created and built a groundbreaking stand for Bethseda Software.

The brief was to recreate Bethesda’s game, Brink, in the real world. Nicholas Alexander devised a three dimensional environment inspired by the two key aspects of the game: a dystopian container city and a utopian floating island. Thus visitors could preview the game and experience it three dimensionally and leave the stand feeling as though they have lived the game.

We worked closely with Root design studio to develop a layout with real functionality. It included two screening rooms, a game demo area and a fully immersive 360 degree cinema. And in the middle of it all, a peaceful, utopian floating island featuring projected footage from within the game and a large sculpture of the game’s iconic tower.

All the elements were created from scratch, from raw materials, and to a class 1 fire resistance. The entire project was delivered in 8 weeks from concept to opening in Cologne, thus proving that a tight deadline doesn’t have to limit your creativity!

We were approached in 2010 by PD3 to take a project for Sony from its preliminary stages to completion. There was already an agreed structural design that had been submitted to the airport operator, in this case BAA. Our role was to deliver the project as per the visual plan, and fulfil all of BAA’s stringent technical demands, and fit the whole object through a security scanner!

We rationalised the existing project plans, and produced our own construction plans which were submitted and agreed to by BAA. At all points we also needed to consider the requirements of Sony, and deliver a high quality object in a very short lead time.

Despite some teething problems with the incumbent logistical company at the airport, we worked through the night over a period of two weeks to complete the installation.

PD3 had produced an innovative 360 degree immersive film that we showed on Sony hardware in the centre of the stand. We also included space for product display, a projection onto the ceiling, and a constantly moving spiral of coloured light.

This was a project that required extremely close collaboration on all elements, and throughout the process we pushed the boundaries of material supply chains, on-site installation processes, and put a large and structurally difficult object in one of the most controlled environments in the country – Heathrow’s terminal 5.