New airport makes loggers feel at home
NELSON LOGGERS USING THE NEW PASSENGER TERMINAL AT their local airport, due to open next year, will feel right at home because all the wood used in the construction has come from forests in their region.
The $32 million building not only has a frame made with wood, it’s been designed to show off timber harvested from the hills surrounding the city and many of its components were fabricated in a building just off the main runway.
Simon Hardy, of Studio Pacific Architects, told the NZIF conference in Nelson last month that some of the large structures for the new terminal were made a few hundred metres away for ease of transport.
The new terminal, which will be twice the size of the existing one, features timber prominently throughout and a unique roof structure has been designed to mimic the western ranges, which can be viewed through the ‘floor to ceiling’ windows.
Among interesting facts on the new building are: 610m of LVL is being used (the equivalent of two rugby pitches worth); the wood is estimated to have taken around 3 hours of growth in the Nelson/Marlborough region; while the LVL components took only 2.5 days to produce they required 62 days of CNC machining into the finished articles. And the whole building sits on Resilient Slip Friction Joints to soak up the shocks in earthquakes so that it remains totally undamaged.
NZL