Australia’s first curved mass timber facade is open and enrolling students for semester one 2026, with the University of Newcastle’s new $58 million Gosford campus already one of the most hashtagged buildings on the Central Coast. That is according to Paolo Aschieri, director of Theca Timber, whose company supplied the timber elements for the project.
Timber, by its nature, wants to be straight. Curving it at scale — across a building facade, on a fixed budget — is the kind of problem that sends engineers back to first principles. Aschieri said it took a collaboration between Austrian mass timber specialists Rubner and Australian structural engineers Northrop to crack it.
“I am incredibly proud of the design that our long-time partner Rubner and Northrop put together in this job,” Aschieri said. “Their combined engineering expertise was pivotal in translating this complex mass-timber design into a structural reality.”
The three-storey facility at 305 Mann Street was built by Hansen Yuncken, with Savcon installation — 550 cubic metres of cross-laminated timber and 480 cubic metres of glulam forming the superstructure. Lyons Architecture and EJE Architecture designed the building. It came in on time and to budget.
That last point carries weight right now. Structural steel has been hammered by price creep, and construction clients are paying for it. Gosford is a direct counter: a technically demanding build, delivered in a regional market, finished to programme. And Aschieri makes no apology for saying so.
“For Theca Timber, it has been a privilege to work for Hansen Yuncken as a valuable client, as their commitment to sustainability and innovation provided the ideal platform for our team to deliver such a job, respecting the wonderful vision of EJE Architecture,” Aschieri said.
“This project is particularly significant for including a striking curved façade structure made of timber, which we believe is the first of its kind ever realised in Australia, marking a new frontier for timber architecture in the region.”
It comes amid a wider push by Australian universities to embed mass timber at the centre of campus development — and Gosford is targeting a 6-star Green Star rating, with the timber structure carrying the bulk of the building’s embodied carbon credentials.
The facility was funded through a three-way partnership between the Federal and NSW state governments and the University. More than 900 students are expected to study there within the first decade across allied health, bioscience, law, digital transformation and business — the first of them walking through the doors this month, as Wood Central reported when the project broke ground in 2023.
Theca Timber’s prior credits include the Sydney Fish Market. Gosford is harder to pull off — a regional campus that bent timber into a shape the industry hadn’t managed before, on time, and on the money.
