Shorne Wood Visitor Centre

This striking visitor centre at Shorne Wood is by the Lee Evans Partnership who worked closely withKent County Council’s Property Group and Environment and Regeneration directorate to turn the design into reality.
The site is located beside a sweet chestnut coppice and the driving force behind the design was to incorporate this timber into the Centre wherever possible to show its value as a building material.
Sweet chestnut is not naturally suited to structural use and is generally used as feature cladding on contemporary buildings. The design team needed to prove that it could be used for structural support. By fabricating sweet chestnut into glulaminated beams, by taking small pieces of timber and finger-jointing them together to form a larger composite section, a useful engineering beam could be produced. As there was insufficient engineering data available for sweet chestnut to enable the engineers to calculate dimensions and connection details, In Wood Developments made several beams for BRE testing. The results from these successful tests were then transferred into the engineer’s specification.
The design concept called for a structure that echoed the area’s shipbuilding tradition and allowed the building to undulate, reflecting the surrounding Kentish downs whilst never exceeding the height of a Kentish cruck framed barn. A key constraint was that In Wood’s jig could only produce beams 7m long. However, an innovative solution turned this restraint to advantage. Thirty-two identically curved glulaminated sweet chestnut beams were designed and pairs of beams connected together, similar to the ‘hinge’ on a pair of scissors. It was then possible to open and close the beams increasing and decreasing the ridge height of the building, and by extension, decreasing and increasing the width of the building.
The Centre is significant because of the sheer size of the glulaminated beams utilised in its two storey structure. A substantial percentage of the Centre’s energy needs is met by green energy, utilising wind and solar power, recycled rainwater and bio-mass heating, which will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 10 tonnes per annum, saving an estimated £7,000 annually on energy costs.