Design gallerist bring to you an Yummy Wooden Waffles installed at Canada’s National Arts Centre. Most of the waffle slabs that wesee have been concrete. The concrete was replaced with wood, that is even coming to waffle slabs, with the new addition to National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where they picked up on the existing waffle slab architecture, and have built a waffle slab out of cross-laminated timber, a first. More coverage on that to come.
They were also beautiful, so they weren’t covered up with drywall but left for all to see. They are so attractive that sometimes they are decorative, as in Marcel Breuer’s MET Modern Gallery in New York, or in the original NAC.
Diamond Schmitt Architects (DSA), have carried the theme of the waffle ceiling through into their addition, installing decorative waffles made of wood, chosen, according to Timothy Schuler writing in Architect, “to celebrate Canada’s vast forests and to showcase a domestic product—glulam made from Douglas fir trees grown in British Columbia.”
The NAC was a wonderful period piece of classic brutalist architecture, but according to critic Alex Bozikovic, was described by its CEO as “ a dark, forbidding, inaccessible place.” So before, where it was windowless, now it is glass. Where it was concrete, now it is wood — because, as DSA partner Donald Schmitt notes, wood is also a warm, “natural material used in a natural state.”
The renovated building is bright, inviting, full of light and warm with wood. The waffles may not serve any useful function but they do tie the new and old together. And we love wood, and we love waffles, whatever they are made of.
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