Shimoda / Bernhard

Pure Timber built a 100' long organic trellis for the Steelcase showroom in the Chicago Merchandise Mart as part of the Bernhard Woodwork Team. This was the largest building in the world when it was built in 1930. Today it houses 4 million square feet of showroom space. This installation was built for NEOCON 2018. Steelcase won "Best of Show" this year. The project was relatively complicated. It was designed by architect Joey Shimoda in Los Angeles, built in Gig Harbor, and installed in Chicago. Besides the client and architect and Pure Timber, there was a general contractor, Bernhard Woodwork, the millwork contractor, local architects, engineers, a client design team and numerous iterations of the project. After bidding this as a single trellis, we were told that it was actually two, split by a curving glass wall. Nice. Pure Timber built this structure over six months, but with changes, most of the work occurred over an intense 4 month period. The project is described further in the image captions below...