Timber Intervention – Morrisons Satelite Campus

Timber Intervention is an adaptive reuse proposal transforming the historic Morrison’s Building into a new Massey University satellite campus. Located in the heart of Wellington, the campus acts as a contemporary meeting house — a place for students to collaborate with creatives across the city’s vibrant design community.

The design employs an extraction and insertion strategy, removing the top floor’s concrete columns, beams, and slabs to be repurposed as community garden beds in the existing car park. The building’s new cross-laminated timber frame reduces structural weight to improving earthquake resilience.

Internally, the project follows a programmatic sequence that transitions from public to private. The ground floor hums with activity — a student exhibition space on one side and communal dining with kitchenette facilities on the other. The second floor features partitioned spaces, including a seminar room, workshop, and a north-facing silent study. Sound insulation around these rooms creates an acoustic threshold, mediating between civic engagement and concentration. The top floor becomes an open studio where students and professors work alongside one another, enclosed by layered timber cladding and softened with wool and natural materials.