Pallet structures in various forms seem to have been growing in popularity in the past few years, if content on the web is any indication. With the benefit of being free and commonly available, those that are able to work around the tricky permitting and somewhat more labour intensive process of building with them can end up with a structure for considerably less than using conventional materials. I may include more about other interesting pallet structures in upcoming posts, but for today I’ll just talk about the one we’re building for the Shelter exhibit.

For our purposes, I came up with a fairly basic design:

It will use about 15-16 pallets, which I was fortunate to have found in the alley behind Cowan’s, only a couple of blocks from the gallery. (thanks Cowan’s!) I’m prefabricating sections of it so things will go faster come install week, which tends to be a bit busy.
Here’s what it looked like laying out the actual pallets, carefully matching them for colour, size and slat spacing (I’m only partially kidding about that):

I’ll likely be finishing up the rafters and so on next weekend, so feel free to stop and say hi if you’re walking by the alley!