Grainform

Entrant: 
James Corles, University Of Auckland

Category: 
01. Student Design Award

Grainform reimagines Aotearoa’s ability to grow, manufacture and use its own timber through a new tree-to-dwelling chain. The project is set in New Zealand’s largest forestry of Kaingaroa, and the small timber town within. 

Kaingaroa embodies a national condition of abundant forestry resources, struggling local industry and a pressing need for quality housing. Grainform proposes a “re-laminated” housing chain that addresses these issues through an integrated architectural project that reconsiders Aotearoa's radiata pine forests. The project is symbolised by the circle and the line.

The line proposes an upgrade and adaptive reuse of the existing run-down Kaingaroa factory, enabling it to produce mass timber products. This new linear factory breaks down the 10 steps of CLT production into three main processes, articulated across three consecutive halls, with the central hall an adaptive reuse. Additionally, a forestry school is tied into the factory’s edge, which aims to restore Kaingaroa’s historic role as a forestry educator. The structure not only upgrades the factory but also offers opportunities to upskill the town, enabling it to build and share knowledge.

The circle is a housing project that tests the 8 x 3-metre factory panels in a ring around the factory. This ring is eroded into three communal houses, creating knots of dense community and spans of open ring park space. The result is a 6-unit communal house composed of a shared living atrium and dwellings that peel from it.
The use of timber was chosen as a response to New Zealand's export imbalance, with 65% of its raw logs exported and 90% of its construction materials imported. The project challenges this balance and champions manufacturing housing where the timber grows and exporting knowledge, systems and architectural innovation instead. Mass timber offers a solution for what to do with our large forestry resources, while reviving rural industry and supplying a new building material for housing at scale.

Timber added value to the project through the design of an architectural system that effectively leveraged both construction methods of engineered timber (portals and panelisation). This system was based on a circulation spine splitting the structure between an open LVL post-and-beam hall and denser panelised rooms. The duality of this material use is reflected in the space's internal function.

Grainform decided to explore Aotearoa’s exotic forests as a crucial resource for addressing housing issues. The site of Kaingaroa served as a microcosm of these issues. Beyond this, the town of Kaingaroa is remarkable as the entire township (of 150 houses), and the factory is all within a single block of whenua Māori owned by Ngāti Manawa. This created a rare condition in which the forest, factory, and community were under a single guardianship. Therefore, Grainform becomes important through its advocacy of New Zealand timber and endangered rural manufacturing.

Grainform explored a new housing chain from forest-to-dwelling through a CLT factory upgrade and mass timber housing scheme, which upgraded and upskilled Kaingaroa, reimagining an endangered timber town as a new epicentre of New Zealand timber.

(MArch(Prof) supervisor Anthony Hōete)