The Green Ark now graces the Meise Botanic Garden on the grounds of Bouchout Castle in the Flemish Brabant. The new pavilion is part of a project to revive and extend 7,600 sq m of greenhouses in this centre of plant conservation. The structure, designed by NU Architectuur Atelier, is fashioned from Kebony Clear wood to create a dramatic lattice structure at the heart of the 92-hectare Botanic Garden’s conservatory complex.
Green Ark: caring for the world's endangered plant species
The Meise Botanic Garden is one of the world’s largest conservatories of endangered plant species. The restoration project encompassed the Garden’s 22 different greenhouses, each one dedicated to a particular environment, while education and conservation are also a key part of the activities on site.
NU have created a dramatic centrepiece in the Green Ark, a pavilion that sits at the heart of the one of the newly restored conservatories and offers visitor and educational experiences. The new structure has a curved roof of Kebony wood shingles that appear like scales as they cascade down its steep curved sides. Inside, the huge arched roof reveals the naked wood structure, raised up on a concrete frame with a glazed ground floor that looks into the surrounding sweep of glasshouses.
Working alongside the Flemish Government and De Keyser Wood Industry, as well as Archipelago Architects, NU have made the most of Kebony’s FSC certified softwoods. The company has become renowned for its ‘modified wood’ process – and for its support of artists, architects and designers – which uses softwood’s much faster growth rate and a special process of combining the wood with furan polymers to increase its solidity and stability. This puts Kebony’s softwoods on a par with hardwoods, at a fraction of the cost and growing team, leading to far more sustainable outcomes for sourcing and carbon capture.
For the Botanic Garden and for Kebony, NU’s Green Ark makes a timely and striking statement, epitomising a more ecologically-led approach to structural timber, and avoiding the use of tropical hardwoods. The new pavilion is also set up to recycle rainwater from the shingled roof, while the rest of the roof structure is a flat terrace that gives elevated views into the surrounding greenhouses. There is also a connection to the on-site seed bank, offering visitors an insight into the ongoing conservation work at the Meise Botanic Garden.
