2015 Canterbury Architecture Awards Winner
Christchurch Botanic Gardens Visitors Centre
The Christchurch Botanic Garden Visitors Centre is a thoroughly contemporary building that strongly connects with the typology of traditional garden glasshouse buildings. Planned around a longitudinal circulation route, the centre provides exhibition space, a function room, café, and workspace, arranged public to private from front to back. This could have resulted in a diagrammatic building. The centre, though, is far from simple. The structure’s long form is an almost ethereal presence within the greenery of the gardens. True to type, everything has been painted white. Yet by adapting a commercial glazed greenhouse system, the repeated angular bays and serrated roof profile have been affordably achieved while achieving elegance and meaning. Appropriately, botanic themes inform other elements: the patterned precast concrete is dappled leaf shadow, and the carpet pattern comprises blown-up plant microbes. The result is a thoroughly integrated work of architecture.
- Practice
- Patterson Associates Limited
- Category
- Public Architecture
- Location
- Canterbury
