Fisher & Paykel’s new headquarters is more than 60% completed with Naylor Love, New Zealand’s first billion-dollar builder, working to close the heart-shaped timber frame, which, if all goes to plan, will house the appliance giant’s administration, labs, and testing facilities in Auckland from April next year.
That is according to Rich Naish, founder of RTA Studio – the architect behind the $200m project, who spoke about “unofficially” New Zealand’s largest mass timber project at the World Conference of Timber Engineering today in Brisbane.
Designed by RTA Studio, the 3-storey ‘home’ office is part of an award-winning 22,779 square metre masterplan and will use a “radical” timber diagrid design – which, like Scion’s Innovation Hub in Rotorua – sees the studio work in close collaboration with Red Stag’s TimberLab to develop an engineering system that uses less material and creates greater stiffness and strength to withstand quakes.
“The main difference (between Fisher & Paykel and the Scion Innovation Hub) is the project’s scale; it has 10 times the floor area of the Scion building,” Naish told Wood Central. “So the logistics of making those eight-metre by four-metre diagrids that we had pre-fabricated for Scion were logistically too time-consuming for the construction pace of the larger building.”
“So that’s why we worked to do a fragmented version of the diagrid that could be assembled, manufactured in smaller pieces and then assembled in a preassembly area, so that we could increase the pace of construction and delivery and the methodology.”
Rich Naish, the founder of RTA Studio, who spoke to Wood Central’s Jason Ross about the project which will eventually use more than 11,000 square metres of timber floor area.
Laying the foundations in May 2024, Wood Central understands that truckloads of cross-laminated timber and laminated veneer lumber beams and columns began arriving at the site in August, with Laylor Nalor revealing in October that crews were making “serious progress” on the installation. According to Scion – NZ’s leading research institute for forest and wood products, the system uses diamond and triangle-shaped timber frames: “The diagrid LVL is fixed with timber dovetail node joints that transfer the loads and steel connectors that will deform in an earthquake.”
“(Our) testing found that, after an earthquake, the test building’s pre-earthquake strength would be restored by simply replacing the steel connectors that had absorbed the earthquake energy and deformed, while the engineered timber elements remained intact,” Scion said.
A past winner of the World Architecture Festival – Building and Technology awards – where it was recognised for its role in using mass timber to drive down emissions, the studio has been working with Māori to design the all-timber diagrid: “RTA Studio has engaged with local hapu, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, to discover and interpret the stories,” it said in a statement. “The concept motif of the flounder (pātiki),” the Studio said, “found in nearby waters, is depicted by Māori as a diamond shape.”
“This is interpreted here in the design of the diagrid structure and in patterns on the woven ‘cloak’ that wraps around the ‘home’, shielding it from the noise and wind of a busy street frontage.”
- To learn more about Naylor and Love’s role in building Fisher and Paykel’s new ‘home,’ click here for Wood Central’s special feature from October 2023. And to learn more about Scion Innovation Hub’s timber diagrid—the first of its type anywhere in the world—click here.
