XFrame Spaces

Entrant: 
XFrame

Category: 
14. Innovative Timber Engineering Award

Photographed by: 
XFrame

Key team members: 
Unispace (Design and Delivery)
XFrame
Makers of Architecture

Meridian Energy’s new Wellington headquarters showcases a uniquely ambitious timber engineering solution, delivered within one of New Zealand’s most challenging interior construction contexts: a Category 1 heritage building, base isolated for seismic resilience, with non orthogonal geometry and a 120 year old timber floor system exhibiting more than 50 mm of level variation over 4 m. 

The project required a structural approach that was lightweight, reversible, low carbon, and capable of performing independently of the base building — a brief ideally suited to XFrame’s engineered, self braced timber structural system.

Working alongside Unispace, XFrame designed, fabricated, and installed six fully demountable room in room meeting spaces placed within the central floor plate of the former Old Bank Arcade. Each room is built from CNC cut modular timber structural panels made out of New Zealand grown and manufactured structural pine plywood. These elements form a complete freestanding system that touches the base building lightly, ensuring no impact on protected fabric while delivering high acoustic performance and a refined architectural presence.

The heritage environment presented significant engineering challenges. Because structures inside a base isolated building must maintain structural integrity during seismic events, substantial uplift resistance was required. However, the aged raised timber floor ran diagonally to the new wall geometry, with inconsistent bearing elements and historical settlement. To overcome this complexity, XFrame engineered a reinforced, levelled bottom plate system anchored only at key structural points, paired with 18 kN hold downs that transfer forces directly into the modular wall panels. This represents a unique application of engineered timber for seismic anchoring in a heritage context, using timber’s predictability, lightness, and adaptability to enable solutions that would have been far more invasive if executed in steel or concrete.

XFrame’s interlocking, self braced timber lattice enables spaces that are structurally efficient, reconfigurable, and materially expressive. Integrated curved panels (600 mm radius) demonstrate timber’s capacity for geometric flexibility, while the lightness of the system allowed precise placement without disrupting the historic floor. Red List Free birch plywood linings, FSC certified timber, DSORB PET acoustic finishes, and double glazed acoustic window panels contribute both to aesthetic quality and to high performance spatial function.

The project targets Living Building Challenge (Interior) certification, demanding stringent material transparency, low toxicity, and regenerative outcomes. Off site fabrication of the self-braced XFrame panels nearly eliminated on site waste, with all timber off cuts returned for recycling. The resulting wall and lining systems are carbon negative, achieving −4.4 kg CO₂/m² for structural panels and −5.65 kg CO₂/m² for plywood linings. The entire installation is demountable and reusable, enabling future reconfiguration or full removal without generating demolition waste.

Few projects globally combine heritage constraints, base isolation, seismic anchoring challenges, regenerative design, and a fully modular timber engineering system. Timber was not merely appropriate — it was essential. Its low weight, workability, seismic performance, and capacity for reversible assembly allowed the team to create high performance, future proof rooms that could not have been delivered using conventional materials