Suspended Remnants is a timber pavilion built from short timber members that would normally be considered unusable for structural applications, due to defects such as knots, checks, splits, and wane. The pavilion instead uses short, defect-free lengths cut from this timber as structural members.

Design and Fabrication

The pavilion applies the Lab’s research on inventory-constrained design. A custom computational workflow combines structural form-finding with an automated part-assignment algorithm, so that the form responds both to structural performance and to the inventory of available short timber lengths.

The arches are assembled from short members joined with a two-way dovetail lap joint, which allows movement in only one direction during insertion and is fixed with two concealed screws. A three-way node connects non-coplanar arches at varying angles. The node is designed to be machined on a 3-axis CNC router, so it can be made in modestly equipped workshops, without multi-axis machining. A translucent tensile membrane forms the skin: a continuous sleeve with seams that follow the arch ridges, stretched onto internal arches at selected points to form funnel and vault-like interior spaces.

The pavilion was first exhibited as a Finalist in an international competition held at the Form and Force International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures conference (IASS02019), 2019 in Barcelona and received a ‘commendation’ award due to its use of an innovative design process. The pavilion was subsequently exhibited at the ‘Future Prototyping’ showcase during Melbourne Design Week 2020, and the World Conference in Timber Engineering (WCTE2025) in Brisbane in 2025. The pavilion also received a 2020 Good Design Award in the Engineering category.

Project Team: Kim Baber, Jane Burry, Canhui Chen, Joe Gattas, Aurimas Bukauskas.

Other Project Pages:

• Good Design Australia. Suspended Remnants

Further Information: DOI:10.1007/s42452-020-03314-9.