The new Luckevich Pinchin Honey Bee Research Centre at the University of Guelph sports a striking white metal facade that contrasts beautifully with its local landscape.
Located adjacent to the Guelph Arboretum, the state-of-the-art 14,000 sf (1300.6 m²) facility combines infrastructure for honey processing, production, and storage, research, education, and administration.
Casting a simple backdrop for the forest’s changing leaves from season to season, the facade boasts 24 gauge white steel with a 1.5 in. (38.1 mm) high rib. This design interacts with its environment, evoking the verticality of the trees in its profile, and providing juxtaposition between the cladding and the warm reds and oranges of autumn leaves, the stark green of spring, as well as the cohesive immersion with the white of winter snow.
By the windows, the metal siding is a 22 gauge steel coated in a medium-dark shade of blue.
Providing shade by the building entrance, as well as a visual anchor, a section of the roof protrudes into a point. Corey Brown of Moriyama Teshima Architects, who served as the project architect for the design notes, “the steel structure achieved the thin fascia to match the column cover’s width, which was a desired outcome for the design in supporting the suggestion of a folding movement.”
A visible area of roofing above the standard parapet is clad in the same material as the siding to create a cohesive look across the fold. In the installation process, the material was arranged into its angular shape which Brown reflects, “This achieved alignment with the two geometries as they meet which would not have been possible with a more rigid material, providing a clean expression of an inward folded geometry.”
Further establishing the seamless look, Brown explains these panels were “cut between ridges at the louvers where 50 percent open perforated metal screens are mounted behind the openings but covering the standard louvers.”
Together, the white ribbed steel cladding, blue window surrounds, and folded roof geometry give the research facility a crisp, seasonally responsive presence.
