Barbados National Performing Arts Centre, Phase 1 has been recognized as an Outstanding Project at this year’s NCSEA Structural Engineering Excellence Awards - announced last night in San Francisco!
While the award is engineering focused, the judges consider numerous criteria, including design, fabrication, and construction.
2026 NCSEA Structural Engineering Excellence (SEE) Awards in San Francisco.
Four Months to Design and Build an All-Wood Performing Arts Pavilion
The Barbados National Performing Arts Centre is the island’s first purpose-built performing arts venue. Its Phase I structure is a 35,000 sf all-wood pavilion, designed, engineered, and built in four months to open for CARIFESTA XV.
Designed by Adjaye Associates, the pavilion is a temporary venue built directly onto the permanent foundations of the future Barbados National Performing Arts Centre, Phase II.
Phase 1. Photography: Peter Maier.
At its heart is an 80 ft span, 20 ft deep central truss. The truss geometry was optimized as an arch to channel forces into compression, enabling load transfer entirely through timber joinery.
The top chord required a splice at midspan. The solution was the okkake-daisen-tsugi, a traditional Japanese scarf joint, scaled to nearly three feet deep. Its interlocking saw-tooth geometry transfers both bending and shear, and it is secured with purpleheart hardwood pegs driven straight through both members, with no adhesives or metal fasteners.
The bottom chord carries up to 160,000 pounds of tension through a concealed, toothed Mass Plywood splice, with zipper-shaped wooden keys transferring axial load through bearing and mechanical interlock. The truss contains no steel; lateral bracing is slender hurricane cables.
An integrated design-build model made the four-month schedule possible, with connections sketched, analyzed, prototyped, and fabricated in parallel.
Designed as the permanent core of the future Phase II theatre, its perimeter canopies will be reconfigured rather than demolished, creating two buildings from one set of materials.
