What’s it made of?
Designing any visitor experience involves hundreds or thousands of design decisions. One of the most important is materiality.
What’s it made of?
Material choices have big practical and cost implications, but they also play a huge role in creating the “vibe” of a space, and influencing the emotional response of visitors.
“Captain Sensible”: practical considerations
Materiality always has to be fit for purpose, which means:
Affordable ‒ within the budget
Durable ‒ (depending on context). Materiality for temporary experiences is usually different from long-term ones. Outdoor installations have to be as weather-resistant as possible
Tough ‒ particularly if people are likely to touch the installation, or it has moving parts
Safe ‒ for example, fire-rated, and not (say) sharp
Sustainable ‒ thinking about how the material is sourced, and whether it is recyclable at the end of its use.
“Swathes of Mauve”: aesthetic considerations
If practicality was everything, visitor experiences would all be made out of a narrow range of modern materials. So why aren’t they? Because we humans are all actually highly sensitive to materiality, picking up visual, tactile and aural cues from it. We understand the intent behind interesting material choices even if we can’t put it in words. And we also “read” more obvious, boring or cheap material choices as indicative of lack of care or imagination.
Below is a “taster” of some types of materials we’ve used ourselves or seen in visitor experiences around the world.
Timber
Timber conveys naturalness, richness and warmth and can be carved into almost any shape. The gorgeous timber document room at He Tohu was designed by Studio Pacific Architecture.
Corten
Designed to rust on the outside and then be more or less indestructible, corten is a cost-effective way of creating strongly graphic outdoor installations. We’ve used it on projects like The Many Lovers of Auckland and Snow Leopards.
Concrete
Durable, infinitely shapeable and “texturable”, concrete can be an expressive medium too. At the Snow Leopards exhibit at Wellington Zoo, we sandblasted concrete panels and then carved tiny snow leopards into them, as a hidden treat for young visitors.
Fabric
At Te Hononga at Kawakawa, we worked with local weavers to create soft, varied, colourful backgrounds for graphic panels, screens and showcases.
Autex
New Zealand-made Autex (and its various international imitators) is a material with great acoustic properties. It can be printed on and scored into curves, and has an attractive softness to it - and it is mostly made from recycled materials. We used it at Tjapukai, Te Whare Hononga and Burra.
Kaynemail
Kaynemail is another sustainable New Zealand material that has become internationally popular as an architectural mesh. Its origins are in the plastic chain mail created for the Lord of the Rings movies.
Paper
We haven’t done anything with paper - yet. But we’d love to. Look at these examples, many from French company Procédés Chénel.
