York Minster Centre of Excellence for Heritage Craft Skills with Tonkin Liu was recently approved for planning!

Two new buildings at the historic cathedral, housing masons’ workshops, new state-of-the art digital fabrication tools, a drawing room, and a hall of residence for interns and international collaborators.

Two striking roof structures, oriented to optimise northern light, connect the new buildings to existing buildings. The roof designs emanate hyperbolic paraboloid-like geometry, formed using straight timber elements twisting around one another to create striking curved coverings. Both designs use a skin, the same as applied to the rafters, as a compression tension field to achieve greater efficiency throughout the structure.