Georgetown Day School Lobby Net Feature

The Georgetown Day School is a private middle school serving the Washington DC area. The construction of their brand new building featured an oval-shaped net feature embedded in the floor of the main entrance lobby. We worked with them over the course of about 10 months to design a safe, engineer-approved net system. The rendering made by the architecture firm Gensler already had many of the aesthetic details worked out, but they needed a company that could create what they were envisioning. That company turned out to be Tree Weaves.

The net itself is an oval floor made out of 1/2” Amsteel Blue spliced in a 6X6” grid. The 6 square inch spaces are filled in densely with gray paracord, and the entire net platform is gray. Although the main floor platform is one of the strongest nets in the world, the board of Georgetown Day felt more comfortable with the idea of a secondary back up net hanging a couple feet below the main net—so we duplicated the skeleton frame of the main net and made another spliced 6X6” 1/2” Amsteel Blue net that we suspended from a second set of bolts recessed in the wall a couple feet below. Redundancy=safety. Overall, each platform is suspended from 45 steel bomber bolts that were engineered into the structure of the building. Opening 17 feet below the floor of our net is a basement foyer that leads to the performance hall, music room, and gymnasium.

The most beautiful part of the Georgtown Day School Net Feature is the vertical net that goes up to a set of anchors built into the ceiling. This fern green, upside-down-funnel shaped net mostly functions to create a really cool inner space on the net, and to add shape, color, and dimension to the lobby. It is not for climbing.

All in all the Georgetown Day School net loft structure took about 100 hours of planning and admin, and 14 full work days on the job site with 3 people.