AM Structures’ team, from left, Rob Van Meerkerk, Matthew Craven, Paul Jasper, Tony Brown and Keith Fieldhouse, with Mark and Jo Downer.
WIGHT LILVING
THE GIANT, swaying, blade of grass that has just sprouted in Mark and Jo Downer’s Ashey garden is symbolic of their growing yet formerly largely invisible business.
The answer to who made the 35-metre wand, and what it is, is blowing in the wind on the skyline close to Havenstreet.
The wand is visible from a surprising distance and from all manner of vantage points and looks like a giant fibreglass fishing rod. At the tip of the rod is a "seed head", which can be filled with ballast and could weigh as much as half a tonne.
If it hadn’t have been for the interest it generated, Mark and Jo wouldn’t have thought about publicity at all.
He says: "We had never really thought about telling people about what we do, about remaining busy throughout the credit crunch and looking to expand."
The young blade that encouraged the Downers out of their composite shell is designed to be one of a 'field’ of 30 LED-illuminated stalks to light and enliven one of this country’s jolly seaside towns.
The 'mast,’ as people christened it, turned heads when it went up, none less than those of planners. But they can rest easy at their desks. It won’t be there for long — the Downers’ garden is just a testbed to ensure that the grass performs, as expected and will only be there for a few months.
It is designed, not just to bend and not break, but to oscillate, pendulum-style in light airs.
However, within days of its installation it faced storms gusting to force nine in the garden of the house on a hill, each and every flex and quiver recorded, because the client wants it to 'live’ for 50 years and Mark doesn’t want it to fall on anyone’s head.
It is a fibreglass rod positively a-bristle with hi-tech gear. There are strain gauges, a webcam recording its every move, which the Downers can watch from their IW Airport HQ, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. There’s a wind speed indicator too.
The blade may be high profile on the Island but, in terms of structure, it is quite ordinary in the general scheme of things turned out by Mark and Jo’s AM Structures.
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| The blade of grass structure that appeared near Ashey. |
Their company is a tiddler by any standards, giving gainful employment to just eight people — including senior foreman Roger Pragnell, who was away when we took our photograph — but it makes big things, with impact.
Jo and Mark want planners to allow them to double their workforce in an extension to their Embassy Way unit that will allow them to build large structures with greater ease — without having to poke one end out of the factory under the cover of an export container pushed up against the main factory.
The roots of the Downers’ enterprise stretch back to 1991 when they built their first boat. The 30ft St Kitts was destined for the island whose name she bears and she has crossed the Atlantic several times since then.
Mark, Jo and their three boys often sail the boats they make.
Mark has co-skippered the 40ft Cracklin’ Rosie in the Fastnet Race with its co-owner, one of five trips he has made on that sailing marathon.
Rosie’s owner comes from Dublin and there is a strong AM connection from this Garden Isle to the emerald one.
The Downers are hoping to compete in the up-and-coming Etchell World Championships off Ireland but this time there will be family crew competition as Jo facing a challenge from 15-year-old George to sail alongside Mark and eldest son, Oliver. Luckily third son Alex is yet too young to compete for the three available spaces.
Another connection with Dublin is the eight-metre poppy on trial near Dublin.
It is more complex than it may appear at first, turning as it does so that it doesn’t present a sail to the wind that would carry off the flowerhead in a storm.
The delicate, and intricate, shape of a poppy flower came from the CAD skills of Medtec, just one Island company which gets spin-off work. Another is Grist Electronics just across the way from AM.
Main partner in much work, Gurit, supplies materials and exhaustively analyses the stresses and strains so that structures do what they are meant to do.
Further evidence is found in Birmingham’s Rotunda, where multi-leaved structures stand. Each £3,000 leaf is engineered to move in the breeze.
There is no more important structure to take the strain than a rail bridge and earlier this year a new composite bridge — only the second of its kind in the country — built by AM Structures, was forklifted into place near Blackpool. It’s made of carbon fibre with a sandwich filling of foam.
The statistics are impressive. Despite being 24 metres long with flights of stairs at either end it weighs just over three tonnes. The original cast iron structure weighed-in at seven tonnes and a modern steel equivalent would have been much more than double that.
Importantly, it could be installed at night in just six hours, keeping timetable disruption to a minimum.
It was approaching the millennium that the Downers started their shift from boats into complex artistic structures.
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| The 15-metre dish in Canary Wharf. |
Mark freely admits to being more hi-tech artisan than artist and the 15-metre diameter Canary Wharf dish is a huge fusion between the two. It sits on glass, appearing to float in the air, gleaming blue-purple.
You will have seen it on TV coverage of the London Marathon; now you know its roots, the fact that it was barged from the Island and there was once a plan to fly it from here to there by Chinook helicopter.
It marked a sea change from boats, although projects like cladding the 130ft King George V replica Britannia in epoxy down on Russia’s White Sea have been among useful, recent, marine contracts.
Art meets practicality in the giant doughnut displays that appear to float about a sports shop; New Look’s flowing displays were AM’s first dip into relative mass production and at the new Angel offices in London there will be a 20-metre tall seat, a design inspired by treacle dripping from a spoon.
The Docklands Light Railway has a flowing 16 metre by five metre canopy that two years ago filled up most of a ferry car deck as it made its way from the Island.
On the more prosaic, but technically very challenging level, Liverpool police have a giant sniper screen protecting them from the adjacent car park. It was made by AM.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has an eight-metre tall lampshade; Venice a yellow, wave-like bed like no other and an exclusive London club a reception desk, bar and chairs that again hold the trademark lines of renowned architect Zaha Hadid. She and AM have collaborated many times.
Hadid has done interiors as well as buildings and she and some of her architectural team of 250 will be working on the London Olympics aquatic centre. Mark wants to make the diving tower and its boards, set to be trodden in 2012 by medal hopefuls.
"As far as I know there is nothing to stop the boards and the tower being designed in the distinctive Zaha style. The debate between her and the Olympic committee will be an interesting one, I’m sure," said Mark.
"We don’t work for boring clients and we don’t do boring work, so my bet is it will be on the interesting side…"
Reporter: richardw@iwcpmail.co.uk