Learning from Trees

Venice, Italy

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Learning from Trees

Venice, Italy

Firm

Andrew Barre Lab

Type

Commercial › Pop-Up
Cultural › Pavilion

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2021

SIZE

0 sqft - 1000 sqft

BUDGET

$50K - 100K

Photos

Marcela Grassi (9), Mark Smith (2), Andrew Barre Lab (1)

This project was an invited contribution within the Italian Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The theme of the Italian Pavilion was Resilient Communities, the various exhibits showcasing a wide range of innovative approaches to the current climate emergency. We were invited to create a meeting and display space that both showcased the innovative use of timber, and housed seating, tables, and display plinths. Covid restrictions during the Biennale meant that these functional elements were not installed. The result is a complex lattice-like 35m2 structure that looks as if it has been woven, only out of 1.2kms of custom milled timber. The project also included custom seating, designed and digitally fabricated to demonstrate one further benefit of timber—it can often be used over again, often becoming more beautiful as goes. The timber had for 70 years been part of a now-demolished state house.

Our goal for the project was a lightweight, sustainable structure pointing the way to a different kind of timber construction.

In recent years, University of Auckland staff and students have been developing lightweight timber structures fabricated from relatively small structural elements with relatively complex machined joints. These timber elements occupy something of a gap in the spectrum of CNC fabrication options available in New Zealand: highly specialised CNC machines are used to fabricate heavy primary structural members, while smaller, more widely available milling machines are used to mill sheets into interior elements such as cabinetry. However, thinner, non-repetitive structural and finishing timber elements are typically still made by hand on the construction site. We have devised a ‘hack’ methodology for efficiently modeling and milling such elements en masse using standard CNC machines. This involves digital processes for modeling elements and preparing cutting files, as well as the development of a jig system that allows over-length elements to rapidly be secured in the milling machine, milled, and removed for assembly.

The design of the project had to meet a number of constraints. The project needed to be able to be compressed into a minimal volume for shipping. However, there was only a short window for the assembly of the installation, so it needed to be able to be rapidly and accurately assembled in the gallery. Further, the budget for the project was small: NZ$160,000 for the project—design, fabrication, shipping, installation, and eventual relocation. Like any architecture project, this installation had to reconcile issues across the conceptual-to-pragmatic spectrum — the poetics of timber, construction issues, detailing, budget and sustainability.

A major challenge when designing timber structures is that the joints are often reliant on steel fixings to transmit loads and allow ductility. What begins as a largely timber structure can quickly become dominated by steel plates to make the joints function. This type of construction is expensive and complicated, negating the sustainability, economy, and ease of construction that are the great benefits of timber. Further, in complex timber structures, particularly those following non-orthogonal geometries, joints and corners often become geometrically complex and difficult to build. The solution used is not to ‘fold’ the structure around the form, but consider the structure as three-dimensional at the outset. This means the corners become very simple, and can be resolved with simple L-plates. The timber structural elements use diamond-shaped profiles, but by embedding hidden symmetries into the geometry, the number of different profiles and joint types was cut in half.

Learning from Trees draws on New Zealand’s history of building with timber, in both our colonial and Pacific architectural histories. The result is a slender, lightweight, sustainable structure that points the way to a different kind of timber construction. Responding to climate change through low-carbon architecture is an urgent challenge. However, other developed economies are large and very much interlinked. They can take advantage of materials and technologies and skills from across a wide area— a tree can be cut in one country, milled in a second country, and inserted into a building in a third country. By contrast, we are a small nation located far from almost everywhere. Our people may be able to move relatively freely, but not so building materials—we must rely mostly on materials produced locally. So our constraint is that of a modest economy—we must find ways of doing things ourselves, within our small market, and with our available technology. If we want to innovate, we have to do it by making difficult things simple rather than creating more complexity.

Material was carefully ordered and processed. The range of element sizes meant that through the fabrication process almost nothing entered the waste stream. At the conclusion of the Biennale the structure was disassembled—no glues or irreversible fixings were used—and is currently being permanently reinstalled for use with in a research institute an Italian town near Pisa.

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Learning from Trees

Venice, Italy

Learning from Trees

Venice, Italy

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team