Ok so you a little confused by the name and the design didn’t exactly help either. But before you completely freak out and start hyperventilating about potential giant glowing porcupine nightmares this thing is likely to inspire, allow me to explain. A sitooterie is small building in which one can, well, ‘sit oot’. Sounds funny but that’s just because it’s derived from Scottish. Anyway, this incredible sitooterie was designed especially for the directors of the National Malus (crab-apple) Collection for their site in Essex.
The structure itself is a giant 2.4 x 2.4 meters cube with over 5000 long thin windows sticking out of its surface that make it lift out of the ground. The cube is precision-machined from 15mm anodized aluminum while the windows are made of 18mm square-section aluminum tubes that are glazed with transparent orange acrylic. Since all the windows point to the exact centre of the cube, a single light source makes the whole thing light up like those fancy optic fiber lamps that were quite in vogue in the early 90s. The fun part is that a few of the windows are also projecting inside the cube making lovely glowing seating to ‘sit oot’ on!
Source: Heatherwick