Constructing an English Village by Ron & Katy Hoess
For our exhibit in the upcoming 2013 Flower Show we decided to try and recreate a portion of a small English village. Much of this was influenced by our trip to England this past June. We particularly enjoyed the Cotswolds and have tried to capture various elements from the villages that we visited. For us, the key elements of an English village include most often a church, a pub, a tea shop and of course the houses. Keeping these elements in mind we made a number of preliminary sketches for our exhibit. Once we were fairly certain of our plan we constructed a full scale mock up of all our structures using foam core. These were then placed in the footprint of our exhibit, and we could easily move them around to make sure everything fit. One of the nice aspects of building the mock up is that it allows you to make dimensional adjustments to the structures before getting into the more labor intensive aspects of actually building the structures. The first picture shows our foam core mock up. To the left is a church wall and next to it our pub. To the right and set back is the tea shop and at the extreme right would be the front of the Cotswold cottage. The open area in front of the tea shop would be devoted to the gardens.
Anthropology of the World's Fairs 