The Sleeping Dragon

Project Info

The Sleeping Dragon is a privately commissioned 8.5 m long sinuous curving oak sculptural seating piece located facing an old dew pond within a garden.

After initial site visits, the clients’ wishes were for a seating piece to give a focal sense of presence to a favourite area of the garden, loosely based on the ‘razorfish’ bench design. The work is also a 30th wedding anniversary celebration.

The seating is constructed of ¼ sawn air dried 68mm thickness within a segmented ‘4mm gap set’ design. The segmented board design enables the seating to easily span the desired 8.5m length whilst allowing a sectional build for ease of transportation to the site and allows for a small amount of give/flex to allow the piece to be easily installed. All fixtures & fittings are stainless steel including the 25mm dia tube connectors. Approximately 24m of tubing has been used within the finished piece. Once installed all fixings visible from the seating boards will be capped – see ‘tail’ section. Extensive form carving has been carried out into seating board structure to provide ergonomic comfort for the sitter & a flowing sense of liquid dynamic movement with the work as a whole. Tool use for seating carving ranging from ‘arbortec’ for bulk hollowing to the use of low angle & convex spokes haves to define edges & shape finishing.

The 3m long back rest curvature has been steam bent from 50mm thickness oak to the desired curvature of the design.

The carved wave form mass base blocks (due to their size) are from ½ section green oak to minimise distortion otherwise encountered in large green centre section oak.

The block laminated Spheres 650mm dia & 340mm dia are turned hemispheres assembled in the ‘halves’ design as featured in other chaircreative works such as the b5 bench & cricketer’s bench designs.

The project was completed & installed in the summer of 2008 and was set on York stone slab footings.