A Garden Shelter for the Young at Heart
The New England Botanic Garden, just north of Worcester, MA is a stunning 200 acre, year round garden. In 2021, a new area was built that is geared towards kids and families with rock structures to climb, plants to touch and taste, and an accessible trail throughout. The project was designed by Massachusetts Landscape Architects Ryan Associates. Dubbed “The Ramble,” this garden needed a shelter where people could retreat, take in the view, and put on events. Ryan Associates reached out, and we were lucky enough to be invited to design and build a timber frame pavilion for this special place.
Keeping the Timber in the Canopy Clears the Understory
Even among timber frame pavilions, which are useful structures when you’re in search of open, uninterrupted floor plans, this pavilion is spacious. Because of the unique structural design, there is a nearly-unhindered view of the gardens from anywhere inside the pavilion. Typically in a timber frame structure, you find large tie beams that span it’s width, tying the two long walls together, about 7-8 feet above the floor, with pitched braces between these ties and the post. All of these timbers just above and below eye-height could block your view. This building, instead, relies on structural joinery where the principal rafters meet, and extra long braces between principal posts and those rafters to tie the building together, which keeps the bulk of the timber up high. Furthermore, the timber posts land on concrete piers, and the whole structure is held aloft by a couple feet. The piers are encased in river rock, matching the aesthetic of the Ramble at large, with its many rocky spots for scrambling.
A Gable Roof Flexes for Ramblers
Undoubtedly the most unique feature of this frame is that its roof twists. This design creates the eye-catching illusion of the building bowing for prayer, or of a leaf falling gently from the sky. This feat is accomplished by having the roof pitch change as you travel through the structure, but keeping the eaves level. Where garden-goers interact with the building, the structure stays reassuringly straight and level, but viewing the pavilion from a distance, you can see it stretching it’s back.
What fun to cut this timber frame! In order to coax this roof into down-dog, each purlin (the roof member that rests on the principal rafters, and travel in the opposite direction) was cut so that the pitch on its top surface changed. Every purlin was unique, with it’s own rate of change, so every frame member had to be meticulously labelled and tracked during cutting, storage, and shipment, until the momentous raising day when it could settle into it’s unique place in the world, somewhere along a plane that changed from a 4:12 to a 6:12 pitch.
Our crew brought the timber frame down to the Botanic Gardens and spent a few days raising it, and then nailing roof boards down in near hurricane weather – an adventure to say the least. It was roofed with cedar shingles. Copper gutters and rain chains add a nice finishing touch to this fine frame. May the young at heart enjoy this grand yogi for years to come.
