I used to be fortunate sufficient to go to Hanger 4 a number of months in the past, because of a web site go to organized by the New Zealand Institute of Architects’ head workplace. They issued an open invitation and, having seen a presentation on its design by Studio Pacific Structure (SPA) director Evžen Novák, I jumped on the alternative. By likelihood, it was organized that I might give a elevate to a postgraduate civil engineering pupil who was additionally attending. He was learning the roads and pipes type of civil engineering, quite than the structural stuff I had assumed would entice an engineer to see the mission. So, on the half-hour drive, I quizzed him about why he was attending — he was “simply ” — and the way a lot of the carbon-conscious strategy we’d see within the structure of Hangar 4 was current in his department of civil engineering — “not a lot”. The dialogue left me pondering over how efficient our actions as architects could possibly be when different elements of the constructed surroundings may show proof against the sorts of sustainability responses we collectively fret over.
We could spend hours hunched over product declarations and spreadsheets making an attempt, amongst different issues, to dial down our use of concrete and metal in favour of climate-friendly mass timber however are we simply counting the carbon on the deckchairs of the builtenvironment Titanic?
We now have wonderful native exemplars of mass timber buildings of assorted sorts. This contains workplace buildings comparable to Warren and Mahoney’s new 90 Devonport (2025) in Tauranga, institutional buildings comparable to Irving Smith Architects and RTA Studio’s Scion Innovation Hub (2020), and academic buildings of assorted sizes, together with Tennent Brown Architects’ Ngā Mokopuna (2024) and Cathedral Grammar Junior Faculty (2016) by this author and Tezuka Architects. We will additionally look to residential tasks, ranging in scale from Mason & Wales’ Pupil Village (2018) in Dunedin to RTA Studio’s compact new Dwelling Home (2025). The automobile experience out to see Hangar 4 highlighted the query of how we’d make use of mass timber past these constructing sorts — within the different kinds of development which account for a lot of the broader constructed surroundings: bridges and transport infrastructure, agricultural and industrial buildings, energy and information services, and so forth. There are pretty strict limits to this line of thought; we’re unlikely ever to have timber footpaths or motorways or sewer pipes. Likewise, it could be intellectually satisfying to supply buildings completely in timber, however it’s more likely to be technically troublesome and presumably not value efficient. The productive path ahead is to make use of timber for what it’s good at. Warren and Mahoney’s 90 Devonport, for instance, combines timber columns, beams and flooring with metal bracing. Equally, loads of potential stays for mass timber in new functions, even when it is just particularly elements of tasks. Opportunism is key.
Hangar 4 is the centrepiece of Air New Zealand’s upkeep base at Auckland Airport. It was required to accommodate concurrently a big wide-body plane of the kind used on long-haul worldwide flights, in addition to two of the narrow-body planes Kiwis know from hops between our large cities.
SPA’s work at Auckland Airport started with a master-planning mission, which led, in flip, to Hangar 4. The apply was behind one among Aotearoa New Zealand’s most bold long-span timber buildings: the award-winning Aviation Show Corridor on the Museum of Transport and Expertise in Auckland, accomplished in 2011. The Corridor included a number of improvements, together with big portal frames of LVL, however is just half the span and just one fifth the realm of Hangar 4 — a mission of a scale not beforehand tried in New Zealand.
SPA’s design course of for the constructing didn’t assume a mass timber answer however started with an in depth comparability of timber and traditional metal choices. Timber received out over metal due to its environmental advantages, gentle weight, seismic flexibility and resistance to corrosion from salt air — the shoreline is only a few hundred metres away. The early involvement of timber suppliers confirmed timber was value aggressive with metal. The ensuing design has a transparent span 98m large and 35m excessive and, at 10,600m2, the hangar is the most important single-span timber hangar within the southern hemisphere – half as large once more as Air New Zealand’s largest present hangar. This huge house connects with one other 6000m2 of workshops and engineering areas: the entire knitting into an present set of hangars, aprons and airside operations.
The power is state-of-the-art. There’s an intricate adjustable platform to permit work round visiting aircrafts’ maintenance-intensive nostril sections however a lot of the specialist gear is out of sight. Key objects are buried beneath flooring stage, constructed into the slab in order to not impede plane motion and but to be effectively accessed when required through heavyduty trapdoors. Components and tools are saved in workshops and power rooms organized down one aspect of the primary house. What impresses a customer is the distinction between the huge scale of the house and the fastidiousness of the processes undertaken inside. As with surgical groups, all instruments and elements are meticulously counted out and counted again in to the workshops. The stakes, in fact, are excessive — you wouldn’t wish to be a technician questioning the place a spanner is, solely to understand it’s presumably bouncing across the mechanical innards of a airplane now cruising at 30,000 ft. The designers focused an bold Six Star Inexperienced Star certification. Along with the mission’s carbon sequestration via using mass timber, the ETFE façade reduces operational power use. It admits daylight, lessening the necessity for synthetic lighting, and insulates the constructing, eliminating the necessity for lively heating. To verify this, the hangar was thermally modelled to make sure it stayed throughout the desired temperature band throughout the 12 months. Energetic louvres within the façade permit stack and cross-ventilation, and huge followers help with airflow to make sure a snug working surroundings.
However reaching this was not simple. The large trusses, which mix components of LVL and CLT, have been every factory-assembled in 5 25m-long sections in South Auckland and transported to the location. These sections have been joined collectively flat on the bottom, fastened to the ground slab at their ends with big metal hinges, and then rotated up into place by New Zealand’s largest crawler crane. The constrained web site and the necessity to hold development transferring required all kinds of logistical and geometric cleverness. The crane moved throughout the location 2m above the bottom on a short lived platform, permitting the 600mm-thick trusses to be assembled in sequence on the bottom behind the crane. As development progressed, the crane may slowly roll again alongside the size of the constructing, its motion impeding neither the continued truss meeting beneath and behind it, nor the ending work carrying on in entrance of it. The ETFE pillows, that are corrosion resistant and thermally insulate the house, have been then fastened over the construction.
Regardless of being constructed from mass timber quite than spidery steelwork, the completed constructing is extremely slight. The sunshine filtering via the ETFE pillows, slender trusses and extensively spaced purlins give the huge house a luminous, floating high quality. On the time of the location go to, the constructing was nonetheless receiving its ending touches. Key members of the design and development crew spoke in regards to the mission, all with the authoritative however mutually appreciative tone of a workforce which has collectively pulled off one thing troublesome. The speak was much less in regards to the bodily construction than in regards to the effort expended on getting these slender components into place: a years-long technique of fixing intersecting issues of logistics, sequencing, short-term works and heavy tools, all sophisticated by the necessity to guarantee continued operation of the services the brand new constructing shares with the prevailing hangar subsequent door. All that effort is invisible now; as is attribute of well-designed large tasks, what stays is a rigorous alignment of structure and engineering that’s skilled within the constructing via the bizarre mixture of scale and magnificence.
SPA has offered an exemplar of a brand new constructing sort executed in mass timber. As is usually the case with innovation, our mass timber buildings have, to this point, tended to be particular issues — high-profile buildings with bold designers and adventurous shoppers. Increasing into new territory is more likely to stay the area of designers and shoppers with the assets and daring to take up alternatives. The problem for us within the wider occupation is to kind a cohort of quick followers behind these main innovation — rationalising and simplifying concepts and techniques to allow their use in on a regular basis buildings. On this approach, we are able to all contribute to the required and collective endeavour of evolving the best way we construct.
