Horniman Museum 

In the Horniman Museum’s 125th year they embarked on an ambitious Nature + Love project, which included plans for a new café, play area and toilets near the boating pond in the gardens. Made possible with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Horniman wanted to make itself more inclusive and accessible, placing environmental sustainability and a commitment to fighting the climate emergency at its heart.

Buckland were asked to help create the glulam frame for a new café in the gardens of the Horniman Museum to house a café, kitchen facilities, etc.

The building design was a geodesic post-and-beam frame – an unusual combination of glulam hexagonal posts with cast concrete bases. The building comprised a circular outer ring beam, with repeating straight infill beams that created a tessellating triangular pattern. The design was both simple and clever in that the glulam triangles themselves were simple, but the repetition of a simple shape created a striking and intricate visual pattern.

The building design uses a combination of UK-grown Douglas fir glulam fixed into concrete bases. The steel fixings were hexagonal to match the posts with intricate steel nodes designed specifically to sit where six beams met at the top of each post. The building was finally treated with Osmo Oil.