The project involves the progressive redesign and rebuilding of a 50 year old marine research campus of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The project has 3 distinct sections: accommodation for students undertaking post graduate studies or on field research as part of undergraduate studies, a science building containing a mix of dry and wet laboratories and academic offices and an interpretive centre in which displays explain the research to the very many members of the public who visit the marine reserve.
The accommodation building is a two storey mono pitched volume clad with an exterior unpainted timber weather screen. The weather screen is peeled away from the array of bedrooms to form a shared circulation and relaxation space enlivened by box framed apertures penetrating the weather skin.
A three storey block of academic offices in the science building is enclosed by a similar range and use of materials as the accommodation block and is connected to the standing seam steel clad laboratories by a glazed circulation element offering views into the laboratories and from the laboratories to the ocean through the clifftop trees.
The third element, currently nearing completion, uses the standing seam metal of the science building to clad a long rectangular public display hall. The metal has variable width seams covering a strongly articulated public façade and completely glazed end walls let the exhibition hall link ocean and the pastoral hinterland.
