Te Whare Nui o Tuteata provides a welcome to the New Zealand Government’s SCION Timber Research Institute in Rotorua, New Zealand; an educational invitation to come “Walk in Our Forest” and learn new and sustainable ways of resourcing and building with timber.
▼项目概览,general view ©Patrick Reynolds
Sitting outside the fence-line to the campus, the building reveals itself like a forest on arrival with entry-level café, display and communal areas providing a real-life experience of science. Timber research is visibly happening in the upper floors and within a three-storey engineered-timber diagrid structure which challenges stereotypes to timber structural buildings.
The expression of the diagrid legibly demonstrates that timber structural buildings do not need to be designed like steel and concrete buildings, but instead can act more like trees where strength follows the continuous grain of the wood. Here, an innovative timber structural node transfers loads and holds a seismic fuse to yield and be replaced after an earthquake.