Overview
Entrant:
Gary Todd Architecture
Category:
14. Innovative Timber Engineering Award
Photographed by:
Nick Beadle
Key team members:
Architect: Gary Todd Architecture
Engineer: Mike Walker; 5DCE
Timber Truss Fabricator: Sriraj Varier
Builder: Michael Kapua, Mike Kapua Builders Ltd
Orokonui House is a home in the Orokonui Valley, Dunedin, New Zealand, offering innovative architecture and engineering, designed and constructed predominately in timber to contextually link with its surroundings.
The home is in a rural residential subdivision between an ecosanctuary and forest, so it aims to challenge vernacular traditional homes by displaying greater ecological respect for the natural beauty of ‘Orokonui’ and the meaning of its name as ‘a peaceful planting phase’. The home is planted on a level platform in a hillside with six tree modules making up the form of a clever arrangement of closed and open spaces to give the feeling of a much larger interconnected space that we naturally experience inside a forest.
To maximise the construction efficiency of the home, interlinked modules used prefabricated timber roof trusses, roof framing, ceiling framing, plywood panels, and battens pivoting around a grid of steel portal frames on a concrete floor to create forms designed to repeat like fractals. This also creates a seamless internal ceiling to external soffit with a continuity that references a tree canopy above a plantation of tree trunks.
We chose to line the ceilings, soffits, and columns with plywood and timber battens to mimic tree branches to create a sense of familiarity and warmth in spaces, plus allow movement in the structure like trees that embrace the wind. The lines of the timber battens draw the eye up the columns and across the undulating ceiling planes as a cluster of trees reaching for the sky.
In Māori culture, trees (rākau) are revered as ancestors and the children of Tāne Mahuta (God of the forest), bridging the spiritual and natural worlds. They symbolize strength, genealogy (whakapapa), and lifelines for food, medicine, and building materials, holding deep spiritual significance as guardians of the land. They embody the profound connection we humans seek with one another and the world that cradles us. Trees represent stability, flexibility, and the cyclical nature of existence. The forest (ngahere) is not just a collection of trees but a living, breathing ancestor to be respected, protected, and used wisely, as does Orokonui House.
The engineered timber result is an extremely safe, comfortable, calm, and peaceful space to experience indoor and outdoor living immersed in its natural environment. This is due to the material selection, with predominately timber products providing a warm and inviting place- which is at the heart of what people want in a home. The feeling of warmth and invitation is apparent from the inside and the outside, particularly in the evenings, when timber trees glow through extensively glazed areas and recessive flaxpod joinery and colorsteel infill bracing walls to be highlighted as the hero.
Though modest, Orokonui House is important, as it tackles traditional architecture and engineering with biomimicry as an exploration of timber use with a sustainable approach to building as a testament to our sustainable liveability and desire for sensory experiences, and to serve as a creative departure in timber use and how we think about ‘home.’