Entrant:
Max Young, Victoria University of Wellington
Category:
01. Student Design Award
Overview
Torotika Centre for Urban Ecology
Torotika Centre for Urban Ecology is a speculative design project for a research, conservation, and education program sited in the regenerating forest of Zealandia Wildlife Sanctuary.
The brief, to envisage an ‘archaeology of the future,’ is responded to by interweaving the lifespan of the building with its site. The mature trees of a historic radiata pine forest serve as a vertical structure. As the native ngāhere reclaims the ecosanctuary, these pines are felled, and with them Torotika is deconstructed in parts. In this way, the design is driven by te ao Māori understandings of time, discussed by McKay and Walmsley (2003) as the “mutability of the building form” that privileges the temporality of architecture rather than the object-in-space.
Zealandia’s past and future are considered through the narrative allegory of Rātā to reconcile human and natural relationships. The building is suspended amongst the trees and grounded exclusively over an historic gold miner’s track for bracing, circulation, and maintenance. This avoids disturbing the regenerating bush and allows historic misuse of the whenua to provide a literal foundation for better understandings of nature.
Timber is structurally utilised in various ways. The floor structure is a telescoping space frame that adaptively triangulates the forest layout, connecting to the living trees with lubricated removable brackets that facilitate movement and growth. This exposed frame also provides inhabitable space for native fauna with built in bird feeders. The roof structure uses CLT as a two-way system to span the irregularly triangulated space frame. The lateral structure is a folded-plate plywood system within the envelope that offers a high strength-to-weight ratio, reducing the dead load on the trees. Geometric Nijeri Arigata joints provide rigidity and express craft as a reusable yet bespoke system that adapts the forest. Informed by this structural paradigm, a semi-reflective folding façade presents different faces on approach, breaking up the building mass within its forest context.
Being sited in an ecosanctuary for native wildlife, sustainably sourced indigenous timbers are highlighted in the design. Naturally durable and stable red beech/tawhairaunui, milled in the West Coast, is steam-bent to form curving window frames, and used as decking in the upper levels. Balustrades of Northland tōtara, meanwhile, connect staff and visitors to this rākau rangatira through touch.
Given the intent to deconstruct Torotika, timbers are also approached as a reusable, recyclable, and eventually degradable material, that can return to the whenua when their useful life in a building is spent. Embodied energy was considered not only through the stored carbon of timber by the ongoing sequestration of the living structure. From the living rākau of Zealandia to structural mass timber and highlighted indigenous species, timber is integral to the adaptable structure and sensitive grounding of this design proposal.
McKay, B., & Walmsley, A. (2003). Maori time: notions of space, time and building form in the South Pacific. idea journal, 4(1), 85-95.
Tutor - Nilesh Bakshi