Nicola Carniato, Director at AKT II, Kitty Byrne, Senior Architect at Hopkins Architects and Steve Holland, Project Director at Laing O’Rourke, provide a triple-pronged summary of a stunning, new timber structure in Oxford.
The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities conceived and designed by Hopkins Architects and delivered by Laing O’Rourke (LOR), is a major academic and cultural building at the University of Oxford, created to bring together the University’s humanities faculties, libraries, and public performance spaces within a single, publicly accessible campus.
The building is organised around the Great Hall, a monumental four storey atrium whose ground floor is open to the public. At its apex sits a timber and glass dome, the spatial and symbolic heart of the building, recalling Oxford’s tradition of civic ‘rooms’ while reinterpreting them through contemporary construction and environmental performance.
The glazed dome is visually legible in relation to the Radcliffe Observatory, especially when approaching from Walton Street, reinforcing a dialogue between the two buildings across the site. The scheme exemplifies a contemporary response to historic collegiate materiality, blending traditional aesthetics with modern methods of construction (MMC) to enable faster, safer, and more sustainable building. The structure features precast concrete columns and slabs, enabling rapid assembly as well as the brick and Clipsham stone façade panels which were manufactured offsite completed in ten weeks.
Dome detailing and strategy
The dome is the crown of the Great Hall, and its design follows the same principles of the main structure where aesthetics are blended with efficiency in design. The timberframed, faceted dome structure is 19m-wide with an intricate geometric form that rises 7m above the building’s roofline. Above the timber dome, a polyhedral glass-and-steel envelope allows for environmental control, while the internal timber dome controls the light and creates a warmer environment.
The dome is integrated into the environmental strategy of the building developed by Max Fordham and contributes to the natural ventilation within the Great Hall. Ventilation is delivered via a demand controlled system with heat recovery which supports Passivhaus performance which was co-ordinated by Etude and maintainsappropriate thermal performance and airtightness strategy. This strategy was coordinated closely with the architectural and structural design, ensuring that environmental performance requirements were met without compromising the clarity of the space or the architectural expression of the timber dome.
The dome’s design contributes to the fabric first approach adopted across the project, with emphasis on minimising heat loss, avoiding thermal bridges, and maintaining continuity of insulation and airtightness at interfaces between the timber structure, glazing, and supporting concrete frame.
The timber structure
While the glazed envelope is supported at fourth-floor level by the reinforced concrete ring beam spanning between the columns, the timber dome is supported on the exposed precast concrete columns at third-floor level, where it directly engages with the internal environment.
The engineered oak timber primary structure of the dome consists of three rings which are running at different levels and are supported by timber struts, forming the characteristic triangular shapes where the louvres can span into. The structure is self-supported, and the members are pinned connected to each other. This simplified design offered further opportunities to achieve the architectural requirement of the details of the connection between the timber members and at the base with the precast columns.
The result was a milestone for timber engineering where the structure enhancesthe aesthetic appeal of the building. This accomplishment couldn’t be achieved without the successful collaboration of the design team with the main contractor and sub- contractor Novum Structures Europe, the manufacturer Constructional Timber and Tamarind Engineering who provided their expertise for the timber connections.
The connection details
The connection strategy was intended to blend traditional carpentry forms with modern screw fixings, rather than relying on fully exposed steel connectors. The primary timber members are connected using traditional mortise-and-tenon joints. The connection between the timber struts and the precast concrete columns at third-floor level was the subject of an intensive, collaborative design process, resolving architectural ambition alongside the constraints of manufacture, erection, and structural performance.
The precast circular columns reduce in diameter between the third and fourth floors, with the change in section articulated through a conical capital. This geometry helps accommodating an embedded tubular steel element, which provides support to the timber struts of the dome. This base connection was a key focus of the detailed design, precisely because the dome was prefabricated and installed in stages, requiring the connection to perform under both temporary and permanent conditions and to accommodate fabrication and erection tolerances.
The installation process
The transportation strategy for the timber dome was developed in parallel with its structural and fabrication design, ensuring that individual timber elements could be manufactured offsite, pre-assembled on the ground logistic area and subsequently lifted as a single unit via a bespoke lifting frame to equalise tension across the 8no lifting points with the use tri-plates provided by Multi-Sec ensuring a precise and safe process.
The timber dome at the Schwarzman Centre is the result of a holistic approach of the both the design and contractor’s team, bringing together structure, architecture, and environmental performance within a single, integrated element. Its design demonstrates a disciplined approach where architectural and structural requirements satisfy fabrication and erection constraints demonstrate a disciplined structural approach. At the same time, the dome supports daylighting, ventilation, and Passivhaus performance, illustrating how architectural ambition and technical rigour can be aligned through close interdisciplinary collaboration.
