Architect James Richärd, who remembers grade-school trips to the University of Arizona's giant tree-ring specimens, has designed a $12 million "treehouse" to display them.
The new building, mostly financed with a donation from Agnese Haury, will also house 2 million specimens in the archive of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
Many of them were gathered by Haury's late husband, Emil, a UA anthropologist who used them to date the ruins of ancient civilizations of the Southwest.
Richärd's Phoenix architectural firm, Richärd + Bauer, won a national honor award from the American Institute of Architects for its other campus building at UA, the copper-and-glass addition to the Aden Meinel Building, which incorporated elements of optical science into its design.
"We look for the nuances of a project that tie it to its sense of place and its unique characteristics and amplify it so that people who come to it have an understanding of what the building is," said Richärd.
People are also reading…
The double-height "trunk" of the new Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research will house an interpretive center and auditorium, and will display the artifacts that intrigued Richärd as a youngster, including the massive slice of a giant sequoia that was on display for decades at Arizona State Museum.
The building is designed to evoke the image of a tree, said Richärd. Its trunk section will branch out in a wider canopy that will hover over the Math Building.
It will be screened from the sun on three sides by rods of copper or sustainably raised hardwood that will move slightly in the wind.
For Tom Swetnam, the lab's director, the building represents an opportunity to highlight the tree-ring lab's history and the importance of the scientific work it does.
"It's going to have a space where we can bring these great tree-ring stories to the public again," said Swetnam.
The project, which includes remodeling the Mathematics East Building, will also provide space to properly catalog and house more than 2 million "ancient timbers" gathered in the 75 years since Andrew E. Douglass formally established the lab in 1937.
They range from tiny slices of the pencil-thin cores taken from trees to a 10-foot diameter slab of sequoia. The samples are currently crammed into nooks among the concrete columns of Arizona Stadium, where the tree-ring lab has been "temporarily" housed for 75 years.
Agnese Haury's $9 million gift will cover the bulk of the project's $12.4 million price.
The building is named for Bryant Bannister, director of the tree-ring lab from 1964 to 1982 and a long-time friend of the Haurys. Early in his career, Bannister was assistant to Douglass.
DID YOU KNOW
Astronomer Andrew E. Douglass, founder of Steward Observatory, was trying to correlate tree growth with sunspot activity when he pioneered the science of dendrochronology in the early 1900s. Tree-ring science really took off when Douglass teamed with University of Arizona anthropologist Emil Haury to develop tree-ring chronologies that dated the occupation and abandonment of the great pueblos of the Southwest at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.
Contact reporter Tom Beal at tbeal@azstarnet.com or 573-4158.
