Forestry Tower was a winning competition entry for the Wujin Agriculture and Forestry Bureau. Our proposal was a culmination of metaphors relating to farmland, forestry, wells, and gardens. Having studied ancient Chinese characters linked to crops and land remediation’s, using them in the facade design and shading system.
The concept we put forward was designed to fuse sustainable design with ancient Chinese culture. Utilising key design metaphors such as ‘farmland’, ‘forestry’, ‘well’, ‘garden’ which are closely related to ‘Agriculture’ and ‘Forestry’. We aimed to provide a sustainable design proposal for the Wujin Agriculture and Forestry Bureau with a strong Chinese culture sense.

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(Forestry Tower)
Our response to the brief was the notion of harvest. The people who work the land, who grow, cut, gather, and stack the produce, who work the land to bring order and harmony to the community.
We sought to celebrate these noble tasks in a bold and visionary architectural response that inspires thinking beyond the normal.
(Form Generation)
The generation of the form has come from a desire to create a building that correlates to the many manners in which the harvested natural product is cut, gathered, stacked, and stored by the hands of the people who work the land.
(Tower Structure)
The structure of the Forestry Tower is based on an 8.4m x 8.4m grid and is established using simple slab and beam construction. A unique innovation to the design of the tower was to group each three floors. Utilising this structural capacity allowed the typical slab to cantilever 1500m from the column.
(Facade)
Our concept aimed to provide a sustainable design proposal for the Wujin Agriculture and Forestry Bureau with a strong Chinese cultural sense. The individual tower blocks were treated as carved seal stones, or chops, symbolic of the scope and charge of the Bureau.
A study of ancient Chinese characters linked to crops and land remediation, allowed us to use them in the facade design and shading system ensuring that the product and project were in complete harmony. The pattern detail of the facade was partially sourced from an abstraction of timber grains and from the depth found in a crystallised jade or stone carved seal.
(Office Floorplan Configurations)
The cantilever and shifting of the floor plates allows the offices to be grouped into clusters of three floors each, that are clad to develop the Architectural form of the project as a series of stacked blocks.
Each three floor cluster has a projecting hood to the East and West, allowing protection, balconies and architectonic expression of the building Form.
The Flexibility of the Office space provided can be utilised in either closed cell office, or open planning, whichever may be desired through the life of the building.
With bridges extruding at each level to extend visual connections both out and within the atrium.

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The Waratah Studio

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The Australian Pavilion, 2005 World Expo

Wujin Forestry Tower