Recently, a flurry of new visitor centres displaying real imagination in the use of timber has emerged in the UK. Now a ubiquitous feature at our historic and landscape attractions, it is easy to forget that this type of building has only really been around in this country since the early 1970s. Their precedent can be found in the education and interpretation centres of the National Parks of the United States, but it is the UK tourism industry that has taken this particular building type to its heart and, outside of north America, now boasts more of these facilities than anywhere else in the world.

In contrast to museums, galleries or other attractions, visitor centres are not usually the object of a visit in themselves, but are intended to service the needs of the public at a more important place or building. Aside from the time-honoured facilities of cafe, shop and toilets, they also often act as gateways and preparatory guides to the main object of the visit. They don’t, therefore, imitate the functions of a museum by displaying original artefacts. Instead, the visitor centre generally provides an exhibition that gives background to the cultural, historical, natural or scientific importance of the place being visited, and whilst often setting the story within a larger context, hardly presumes to satisfy the needs of the specialist. By definition, they are for visitors whose background level of knowledge can’t be anticipated, but whose informational expectations are set by the presentation standards of modern media. Once relatively crude and architecturally insignificant, visitor centre design is now anything but - the best examples today are highly sophisticated and distinctive architectural statements and visitor experiences in their own right.

Site-specific, these well-designed buildings are usually located in close proximity to their subject and are often married so successfully to their context that their presence complements and enhances existing structures. Good, recent examples abide: the spectacular soaring gridshell roof structure of Glenn Howell’s Savill Building in Windsor Great Park is featured elsewhere in this issue (see pp20-23), whilst at the other end of the scale, Richard Griffiths oak structured, boarded and shingled Admissions Building at Kenilworth Castle tilts its cap at the medieval timber construction and its archaeologically significant site. And near Gravesend, the Lee Evans Partnership finger-jointed small pieces of coppiced sweet chestnut sourced in Kent to form the glulam beams that connect to the larch column supports of their visitor centre at Shorne Wood.

Modern materials

Two other recent examples of timber visitor facilities stand out, and Hopkins Architects has justifiably received a plethora of awards for its pavilions at Alnwick Castle Garden in Northumberland and at Broughton Hall near Skipton in Yorkshire. Both demonstrate the practice’s continuing interest in timber as a modern structural material and as a sophisticated cladding option. Alnwick is perhaps the more conventional of the two in terms of purpose, with its ticketing, shops and cafe complemented by a restaurant, hospitality spaces and function rooms. The facility is, in fact, split between the visitor functions and the pavilion that looks onto the extraordinary cascade that is the primary feature of the modern landscape. The substantial glasshouses that were originally supported by the wall that now separates these two functions have effectively been reinterpreted in this timber, steel, glass and membrane hybrid structure.
The diagrid roof has its own precedent in the work of the Hopkins’ office, most notably in the covered atrium of Portcullis House in London, but here it has been given almost classical elegance with its support structure of laminated larch beams and columns. These have been strengthened to support the large span of the vaulted roof, their wooden shafts turned on a special lathe before being sawn down the middle in the planking mill to accommodate internal steelwork.

Timber is the main internal surface material

At Broughton Hall, the new pavilion that sits on an estate that encompasses a small village, a pub and a business park has been grandly titled ‘Utopia’. The building forms the central focus of the business park and provides rooms for meetings, presentations, lunches and evening events. As such, it is not exactly a ‘visitor centre’, but its functions and its important situation in the 1,200 hectare landscape allow it to be reviewed in similar terms. The single storey pavilion stands at the top of a newly landscaped area within an historic walled garden and is raised above ground level on a simple plinth of oak that has been produced from storm damaged trees recovered from the estate. This heightened floor plane, together with the building’s simple light interior, facilitates views over the parkland through the central common room’s frameless glass walls.
Like Alnwick, the plan of the building is simple and follows the rigour of the structural layout. Cedar-clad pods ‘bookend’ the core space, whilst precisely-detailed, laminated oak columns support light, clear span steel trusses and central rooflight. The outside seating area and graded steps of the veranda are protected by overhanging eaves that also shade the windows. Timber is the main internal surface material too, its natural warmth counterpointing the precision of this elegant architecture.

The natural warmth of timber complements the architectural design

Like so many other projects produced by the Hopkins’ office, the apparent simplicity of these two pavilions is belied by the sheer quality of their detailing. More surprising is the discovery that the bulk of the timber used to construct them – as with the other visitor centres mentioned above – is home grown. Only a few years ago it would have been almost impossible to source materials like larch, oak and sweet chestnut in the quantities and quality required to produce buildings of this standard.
It is to the architects credit that they have made the effort to procure materials – and find innovative ways of using them – that reduce the carbon footprint of the projects. The opportunity to do so is not exclusive to visitor centres, but the degree of material research and radical invention they offer have turned this particular building type into educational projects par excellence for architects and engineers interested in using timber.