As part of the university’s Hobart relocation, Woods Bagot is restoring and reviving the heritage-listed Forestry Building, including its centrepiece, a 22-metre-wide glass domed conservatory.

Originally designed by Morris Nunn and Associates, the conservatory was built from locally sourced timber beams in 1997 and was formally listed on the state heritage register in 2021. For many years, the building boasted a spectacular indoor forest beneath the glass-domed atrium, but since 2017 it has remained largely unoccupied.  

Woods Bagot Associate Principal and architectural project leader Alastair Flynn says the reinstatement of the indoor forest will create a verdant campus focal point, addressing the conceptual brief for an architectural response that celebrates local ecology.

“The integration of architecture and landscape was a key pillar informing the early design principles,” says Flynn. “Reinstating the native forest was also a central element of the university’s restoration plans, along with extensive green spaces linking the indoor forest and the park spaces outside. The outcome is a blended typology that doesn’t privilege architecture over landscape, and a campus with a rich sense of place and history.”

Once reinstated, the indoor forest will constitute the heart of the building, traversed by a landscaped through-block link connecting a collection of rich and diverse interstitial spaces. Beneath the dome, conditions will replicate a temperate rainforest microclimate, benefitting from capacious 13-metre-high ceilings, access to vast natural light, and services for climactic control including foggers, misters, drip irrigation and forest pools.  

The Maydena forest site was logged and burned around 25 years ago, and the dominant species in the regenerated forest include myrtles (Nothofagus cunninghamii), sassafras (Antherosperma moschatum), celery-top pines (Phyllocladus aspleniifolius) and leatherwoods (Eucryphia lucida), which form a dense, wet forest growing on a shallow soil profile. The trees picked for the indoor forest are between 10 and 15+ years old for the larger specimens, and three to six years old for the smaller, with the significant trees to reach a potential height of 10 metres, while surrounding trees will vary between six and eight metres.

“It will take one year before the trees are formally planted in the dome,” says Roberts. “It’s a complicated process to extract the trees from the forest; we try to take as much of the tree’s roots as possible, particularly the ‘feeding roots’. The canopy will then be reduced by roughly 30 percent, as the tree will become stressed, and a reduced canopy will help retain its core health.

“The trees have been taken to a nursery site 20 kilometres outside of Hobart, where they will be planted into large tree bags, with root hormones added to aid a quick recovery,” he continues. “Over the next year, they will be carefully monitored, further pruned and assisted to regain their health and vigor.”

As well as providing a biophilic internal environment and forging a connection between the campus and the local landscape, the canopy will fill the dome with a rich array of unique Tasmanian temperate rainforest species, providing a dappled indoor environment.

The forest is expected to perform as a living ecosystem, with a diversity of plants steadily growing, new plants self-seeding and older ones lasting beyond the building lifespan with care.