Waitomo Caves Visitors Centre: “The Gridshell” – Architecture Workshop

Here’s a good-looking project, which just won an NZ Wood award for its designers, Wellington’s Architecture Workshop, and their engineers, Dunning Thornton Consultants.

They should take another bow, because there’s nothing else like this in the country.

Taking its structural cue from the likes of Edward Cullinan’s Downlands Gridshell in Sussex (featured here  a couple of years back) the Waitomo Centre features translucent, “inflated ETFE (Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene) air pillows tethered over the gridshell structure like a tent fly.” The gridshell structure itself is made of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) ribs made to shape and then locked together in a toroidal grid  floating welcomingly over the new centre.

Just another reason to detour this way when you’re heading in this direction.  I certainly will be.