Hawke’s Bay Airport’s new fire station has won the Public Architecture category at the 2026 Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay Regional Architecture Awards. That is notable for a 550-square-metre building whose structure is glulam and cross-laminated timber rather than steel — a combustible material, in the one building type meant to fight fire. The award was announced earlier this month in Napier, where RTA Studio won three honours across the evening. The Havelock North practice took the Public Architecture category for the airport station alongside its Hawke’s Bay Museum Research and Archives Centre in Hastings.
A fire station is no ordinary building to attempt in timber. New Zealand’s Building Code classifies fire, rescue and police stations as Importance Level 4, the category for facilities that must keep operating once disaster strikes. Mass timber is combustible, and leaving it exposed increases the fuel load in the rooms it lines, so the station’s timber surfaces were tested against fire-safety criteria before that rating was confirmed.
The win is not the first for a timber fire station in the region. Australia’s first fully mass-timber fire station, the Maryborough Fire and Rescue Station in Queensland, took the global Built by Nature prize for public infrastructure last October, judged the world’s best example of timber use in its category ahead of 400 entries. Designed by Brisbane architect Kim Baber, the two-storey Maryborough complex used about 500 cubic metres of certified mass timber and was independently assessed to have saved roughly 1,742 tonnes of carbon against a conventional build.
The brief was written for resilience. Cyclone Gabrielle tore through Hawke’s Bay in February 2023, cut power and water to the airport and left its operations team running a critical transport hub on whiteboards and landlines. RTA Studio designed the replacement to keep working through the next such event, which shaped its structure, power supply, and water storage.
Low-carbon concrete was specified for the foundations, floor slabs, and external works, helping to reduce the building’s embodied emissions, which the airport wanted aligned with its decarbonisation targets. Hawke’s Bay Airport, on land the 1931 earthquake raised from the Ahuriri Lagoon, has held the Airport Carbon Accreditation scheme’s highest tier, Level 4+ ‘Transition’, since 2023 — a standing no other New Zealand airport has matched.
RTA Studio said the project follows “a more-with-less philosophy.” A long plan runs beneath a monopitch roof that rises over a triple-bay garage, then steps down at the far end to an office, kitchen, gym and open-plan workspace beside a separate control room. Sited airside at the south-eastern end of the runway, the garage at last lets the airport keep every fire appliance under cover, where the 1960s kitset shed it replaces could not.
RTA Studio wrapped the stripped-back rectangular form in green-gold corrugate, a colour chosen to echo the tawny farmland of the district and the nearby Poraiti hills. Vertical slot windows on the rear elevation draw light into the workshop, picked out in bands of Colorsteel in a darker green.
Inside, the lower 2.2 metres of the prefabricated CLT walls have been left visible, under a light whitewash that keeps the timber grain on show. The finish eases vehicle decontamination in the parking bay and carries through as a decorative datum line into the administrative wing.
Roof-mounted solar panels, angled to avoid sunstrike for passing aircraft, generate electricity for the station’s daily operation. Rainwater is harvested from the sloping roof and stored in tanks holding 50,000 litres, drawn on for routine truck washing and, in an emergency, for firefighting. Wood Central understands the airport is weighing a far larger solar array across the wider site.
Hawke’s Bay Airport Chief Executive Nick Flack said at a public open day on 20 May that the station, in service since February, had been built almost entirely by Hawke’s Bay firms, from RTA Studio to lead contractor TW Construction. “All our partners are locals, the build crew’s local,” Flack said.
Napier Mayor Richard McGrath toured the station’s NZ$1.6 million tanker, Judy Drench, at the open day and said the facility had made the region safer and more resilient. “We don’t muck around with lives,” McGrath said, calling the station a sound investment.
Fighting fires is the rarest part of the job, Airport Fire Station Officer Brian Bassett said, with most shifts given over to keeping wildlife clear of a runway ringed by an estuary. Crews use stockwhips, gas guns and fireworks to move birds, deer and the occasional seal off the tarmac, and now cut the surrounding grass to 250 millimetres to keep magpies and plovers away.
Flack said the station has been designed to serve the airport for the next 50 to 60 years — the working life RTA Studio set out to reach in glulam and cross-laminated timber rather than steel.
