Overview
Entrant:
Tennent Brown Architects
Category:
11. Public & Community Building Award
Photographed by:
Andy Spain
Key team members:
Tennent Brown Architects & Dunning Thornton Consultants (Structural Engineer)
ECubed (Services Engineer)
Holmes Fire (Fire Engineer)
Te Whare Hononga is situated on the site of Taranaki Cathedral, Church of St Mary in Ngāmotu (New Plymouth).
The Cathedral is New Zealand’s oldest stone church, and British forces were garrisoned here during the Taranaki wars of the 1860s. The brief for the whare was for a place of connection and reconciliation with mana whenua Ngāti Te Whiti. The whare is a hui and exhibition space that returns a visible footprint for mana whenua, tells the painful history of Ngāti te Whiti hapū and its interaction with St Mary’s and invites room for dialogue and cultural convergence – a continuing journey.
The whare is part of a wider project that includes strengthening of the church, and relocation and refurbishment of the former vicarage.
The design response was to create a contemporary, overtly Māori whare, not large but dominantly positioned, to sit alongside the Cathedral and to compose behind a courtyard for pōwhiri, entry and easy connection to buildings on the site. The plan of the whare is a parallelogram, addressing in orientation the key Māori sites of Pūkākā and Paritutu, differentiating from the surrounding colonial structures.
Dean of Taranaki Cathedral, Jay Ruka describes the project as a ‘Palimpsest: a new layer that reveals and builds upon the past. This is the aspiration of Te Whare Hononga, modern architecture inspired by indigenous imagery that predates Taranaki Cathedral, bringing the ancient, the old and the new into a conversation of equals.
The visible timber structure enhances the value and identity of the building in its expression of this kaupapa. Both wall and roof are composed of a lattice of interdependent Pinus radiata LVL and shaped glue-laminated elements – the same yet different - signifying the common humanity and differing DNA of the two peoples, and their intention of reconciliation, and binding in connection.
The roof is a reciprocal structure. The interdependent main rafters, underpurlins, and perimeter purlins span the space and spread the load onto the perimeter diagrid, allowing it to remain light without any heavy point loads. The structure is held together simply with a combination of CNC housing and screws leaving the members clean and the jointing accurate so that the focus is on the timber elements themselves, and the story that they tell.
Via its embodiment of the Kaupapa, the timber structure reflects, supports and promotes the civic values of respect, honesty and tolerance in an enduring way, for the long-term social cohesion and identity of the community served by the whare.
The timber structure yields an embodied carbon figure of 75% of the RIBA 2030 target, thereby contributing significantly to the project’s environmental sustainability. The pre-fabricated nature of the components, manufactured by Timberlab, reduced site wastage of material and transportation significantly.