2,700 Pounds Suspended Overhead While You Dine: London’s Concorde Sculpture

Wild, ambitious projects can be done — or they can be epic.

Neil Ferrier, founder of the design firm Discommon, chose the latter when his team took on the ultimate challenge: designing and installing a 48-foot-long sculpture of the Concorde, suspended inside a London restaurant.

Ferrier shares what it took to bring his firm’s largest project — in both size and scope — to life. The intricate feat of structural engineering was crafted from hundreds of machined aluminum panels, designed to appear nearly seamless. Along the way, it tested every major aspect of the process: safety (“the damn sprinklers”), budget (“we blew through it”), install (a “team of wizards”), and Discommon’s uncompromising ethos (“f*ck mediocrity”).

“Could we have executed a foam one of these? Of course we could have,” Ferrier says. “And every time I went into that restaurant, I’d be like, ‘this sucks.’ We really asked ourselves, what’s the version of this that is epic?”

This season of Once Upon A Project is presented by KI.

Once Upon A Project is produced by Rob Schulte and Rachel Senatore at SANDOW DESIGN GROUP and is a member of the SURROUND Podcast Network.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.