At Fenton Holloway, we provide bespoke structural design engineering services for all types of art installation, from large-scale public artworks and statues to heritage and historic artefacts.
With 30 years of experience designing unique structures, and the right mix of skills to create beautiful, functional, and cost-effective art installations, we can work with you to help turn your creative concepts into reality.
How We Can Help You:
Engineering advice on how to support and assemble large-scale artwork applications. We can advise, for instance, on the effect of wind loading in outdoor installations, or on how to ensure stability in sculptures with complex geometries.
Computational design and parametric engineering for art installations. We can create bespoke software scripts to design and optimise structures with complex or non-standard shapes, automating repetitive tasks and fine-tuning your designs by making tweaks to various design parameters.
Design supporting infrastructure for displaying art and sculptures in public and museum settings. Many large sculptures require an internal hidden structure that holds the parts together. Furthermore, many art displays are supported by hanging structures and external cable installations to provide safe and secure mounting – we can advise you on how to fix your installation to its supporting structure, framework, or building, in a cost-effective and practical way.
Restoration of historic artworks. We are experienced with working with old materials and techniques to provide a bespoke and sensitive restoration or augmentation service for historic artworks and installations.
Why Work With Fenton Holloway?
If you are an architect or artist working on an art installation, or a specialist fabricator commissioned to create an artwork, and need an engineer to collaborate and/or advise on how to build what you are envisioning, speak with us today to find out how we can help you.
To ensure a successful installation, artists must work closely with engineers and structural specialists to align practical technical considerations with their creative vision – this is achieved through detailed analysis of the structure’s loads and stresses, in order to recommend the appropriate materials and configurations to safely support the piece while leveraging cost-effective strategies in a visually engaging way.
Few engineers have the right combination of skills necessary to approach these unconventional projects.
Our work with historic structures and artefacts, and our position as a market leader in tensile and lightweight structural engineering, makes us a safe pair of hands to deliver high-quality and successful art installation projects of whatever type, in a wide range of public, museum, and private settings.
We can assist with all aspects of design and engineering, from determining the strength of material elements to establishing the right connections and creating a workable framework for how to put the installation together.
Projects
Allongé, New York
The sculptural installation along Manhattan’s High Line forms a dramatic pedestrian tunnel of almost 40 metres in length. Unlike any other temporary shelter in the city, Fenton Holloway worked alongside Zaha Hadid Architects to design an extremely lightweight structure full of dynamism and movement which appears to be hovering and sweeping over the passer-by’s.
Naval Figurehead Display
Fenton Holloway were responsible for the structural engineering and design of this striking aerial display of 14 monumental ship figureheads at The Box, Plymouth. Suspending these gigantic historic figureheads was a unique challenge, as the timber was in extremely poor condition, and the figureheads are of unusual shape and weigh up to several tonnes each.