Honouring the Heritage

The second site I have visited this week was the Kauri Timber Building. Fearon Hay Architects remodelled one of Auckland’s important heritage buildings and complemented it with a new commercial structure that rises above Fanshawe Street.

The building has a light visual presence than the old building. The idea of the façade came from the Kauri Log shape. There is a clear relationship between the existing building and the new one, also the slip between the convex and the concave.

The façade looks like a curtain-wall façade. A lot of careful planning and engineering had gone into the project to develop such a design. According to the architects, Harrison Grierson (the façade engineer) came up with the triangular bracket idea to support the vertical sticks. Otherwise connections to the original building could not have been made. The perforations are hexagonal, they look amazing from a distance. From a design student with the idea "sustainability" in my practice, it is great to see how the architects and the developers chose to retain the historical nature of the existing building, particularly in sustaining the timber column, beams, ceilings and floors. It's hard to imagine how much Kauri was used back in the old days, which is not possible nowadays.