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Media Release from NZ Wood
This month up to 26 leading timber designers and engineers from all over the world will descend on Nelson as part of the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction forum hosted by Canterbury University.
The forum’s venue was changed to Nelson to incorporate a visit to a new building currently under construction for the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT).
The building breaks new ground in its innovative approach to sustainable timber design and is already attracting international interest.
NMIT’s Arts and Media building is also revolutionary in its use of wood as a structural building material in multi-storey construction. It is constructed in a radiata Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL) frame structure using new engineering technology developed by the Structural Timber Innovation Company (STIC).
When completed next year, the building will become the world’s first multi-storey wooden building to use pre-stressed timber as a structural building material.
STIC CEO Robert Finch says the visit will give the building “good international exposure and a chance for them to see what can be achieved with wood as a structural building material”. It is hoped it will encourage the use of wood as a structural building material here and overseas.
The building was designed by Nelson-based team of Irving Smith Jack Architects, specialists in environmental design, and multi-disciplinary engineers, Aurecon.
Their highly original concept for the three-storey building won a national competition for the building’s design run by NMIT and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in 2008. The design brief was that the building had to be sustainable and substantially made of wood.
Timber is sustainable, renewable, locally available and requires less energy to manufacture than other building materials, such as concrete and steel.
Project director Andrew Irving says by using locally manufactured LVL and Potius flooring, the project is supporting Nelson’s forestry and timber manufacturing industries.
The building’s innovative timber design “promotes a sustainable approach to construction, making use of timber as a renewable resource, grown and manufactured within a 100km radius of Nelson,” he says.
The firm designed the building to highlight the many elements of its timber construction.
The building will maximise the warmth and visual appeal of the structural timber. To achieve this all structural timber components will remain visible, which will also allow the project’s innovative use of wood to be showcased to both the design and building industries.
“As architects, we see this as the first in a new generation of creative, sustainable, wooden structured multi-storied buildings,” Mr Irving says.
“The building will show wood being used in new ways”, he says. ‘It will be practical and user‐friendly. The design has had to accommodate the diverse and sometimes conflicting requirements of different arts and media activities. It will need quiet spaces as well as places where there can be lots of noise.”
Mr Irving says there has been strong interest in the project, both in New Zealand and from as far afield as Chile and India.
The NMIT project will also feature as a case study in this year’s NZ Timber Design Society Wood Solutions seminar series commencing on August 31, Mr Irving says.
View the NZ Wood case study here.
Tags: Architecture, Design, Engineering
