The Oregon beams lining the walls of The Forest have been supporting the building for more than a century.
They arrived from the United States in the early 1900s and were fitted out in Hobart’s Crisp and Gunn warehouse. In the 1990s, they were removed and repurposed for the Forestry Tasmania Building. Today, they are in their third life, reused as wall panelling at the University of Tasmania’s newest campus.
Very little here is being asked to do a job for the first time. Delivered by Woods Bagot and a finalist in this year’s Public Building category, The Forest is less a building than a piece of urban repair: a campus stitched together from what was already standing, using adaptive reuse, mass timber and Australia’s largest commercial application of hempcrete.
The brief never called for a landmark. It called for a campus, a fluid educational ecosystem of collaboration spaces, quiet study and civic gathering, drawn into one whole by a connective ground plane.
Where new structure was needed, it was grown rather than poured. The new-build roof is framed in Tasmanian Oak glue-laminated columns and beams, left exposed through the teaching and study spaces so the structure does the finishing work. Nothing is hidden behind a ceiling, which means the material has to be good enough to look at every day.
The provenance is right there in the grain. Tasmanian hardwood, engineered by Australian Sustainable Hardwoods and fabricated with Savcon, Vos, UCI and Torenius Timber, holding up a Tasmanian campus.
The numbers make the argument. By retaining 60 per cent of the structures already on site and designing every new element for disassembly and adaptability, the project cut upfront carbon by 40 per cent against a reference scenario.
That last part matters as much as the first. Nothing here is built to be thrown away, including, one day, the building itself. The Oregon beams have already proved the point twice.
The Forest was built by Hansen Yuncken with structural engineering by Verto, and joins a Public Building shortlist that reflects the depth of this year’s program, the strongest in the awards’ 27-year history.
Whether it goes further will be settled at the gala dinner on Wednesday 21 October at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in The Rocks. Before then, every project in this year’s field is on the People’s Choice ballot, open until 7pm on Friday 4 September.
Project credits: Architect: Woods Bagot. Builder: Hansen Yuncken. Structural engineer: Verto. Mass timber and fabrication: Australian Sustainable Hardwoods, with Savcon, Vos, UCI and Torenius Timber. Photography: Peter Bennetts.
