Savill Building

The Savill Building is a visitor centre at the entrance to The Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park, Surrey, designed by Glen Howells Architects, Buro Happold and Engineers Haskins Robinson Waters. It was opened by His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh on the 26 June 2006.BuildingThe building is located on the space of a mature beech tree plantation which was severely damaged in the hurricane of 1986. All remaining mature trees were retained in the scheme. The Stirling Prize judges describe it as:"This project is a good modern interpretation of that great British traditional form: the Pavilion in the Park."Gridshell roofThe roof is the dominant feature of the building:"So what you have is effectively a great big weather-sealed canopy, perched on dynamically angled steel legs. It is the ultimate summerhouse, the granddaddy of gazebos."Hugh Pearman The building has a 'three-domed' sinusoidal-shaped gridshell roof of two layers of interlocking larch laths (50 × 80 mm) on a one-metre square grid, supported on steel quadropods and a steel tubular ring-beam. The exact form of the roof was designed by Buro Happold to be the most structurally efficient possible using specialist in-house software (Tensyl). The roof is clad in plywood panels, with aluminium weather proofing and a top cladding of oak. All timber was harvested from the nearby Crown Estate. The roof is over 90 m in length and up to 25 m wide, and because of its own separate structural system appears to hover over the brick and glass facade of the building.