Welcome to Te Kohinga the home of the St Albans Community Centre, opened on 10 April 2021. Located between Colombo Street and Caledonian Road in the heart of St Albans, this building tells two powerful stories: one of deep cultural connection through its name and one of environmental innovation through modern wood construction.
Te Kohinga
Name Story
In St Albans originally, much of this area was filled with swamp, raupo and flax and was fed by many tributaries. People of Waitaha, Ngāti Māmoe and Ngāi Tahu would gather resources from here for generations, until the draining of it into the Ōtakaro / Avon River. The name Kohinga (to gather, to collect) reflects the ethos of the gathering of the tributaries into this water body, the gathering of the people to gather / collect the natural resources. The name of the building, Kohinga, is separate from the description of its use (St Albans Community Centre).
Build Story
This new low-carbon building is built almost entirely of wood, using modern technology.
All of the walls, the floors, and the roof of the building are made of prefabricated panels of Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), consisting of cross-wise glued wooden boards. The huge structural timber panels are 100mm to 120mm thick, and up to 9 metres long. The timber floor panels are supported on timber piles and bearers, so the only concrete is in the entrance steps.
The interior faces of the CLT wall and roof panels are exposed to view, stained with an attractive whitewash. The internal doors and many other internal fittings are also made of similar wood products. The outside of the building is clad with attractive radiata pine shiplap weatherboards, giving a welcoming appearance.
The total volume of wood in the building is 293 cubic metres (which weighs 146 tonnes). The nett carbon stored in this volume of structural wood is equivalent to 179 tonnes of CO2 emissions. This amount of carbon storage would offset the emissions from driving a typical family car almost one million kilometres.
As a comparison, if the building had been constructed of concrete rather than wood, the nett carbon balance for the structural materials would have been emissions of CO2 rather than storage, with huge emissions equivalent to 4,400 tonnes of carbon dioxide. If we add this substitution benefit to the storage benefit, the designers' choice to build this building in wood has offset the carbon emissions from driving a family car over 20 million kilometres.
As an aside, most of the wood for this building was imported as prefabricated panels from Austria, because they were not available from any New Zealand manufacturer. Europe was the best place to obtain the panels, satisfying the tight budget and high quality needed for the building design. For carbon accounting, the carbon costs of shipping are almost negligible, so that the carbon storage in the same volume of wood made in New Zealand would have been 179 tonnes rather than 197 tonnes, a difference of only 10%. For future buildings, a large new CLT factory will commence production later this year in Rotorua.
The good wood benefits of this building far outweigh any concerns about the source of the wood. This building has assisted the Christchurch City Council in meeting its climate change goals, resulting in a beautiful new building which is durable, resilient, and ready for use by the local community.