Cassiopeia Terminal

Cassiopeia Terminal

By: Rowan Thackray
In: Commissions Civic/Infrastructure
2 min read
A ferry terminal for Cassiopeia Line, shot with the boats running and the concourse full — which took four visits and a great deal of standing still.
ClientCassiopeia Line
ArchitectTarbert & Doyle
Other collaboratorsStruan Engineering, Tarbert & Doyle (interiors)
Completed2024
PhotographedMarch 2025
A long low terminal building with a deep timber soffit and a canopy over the drop-off
From the approach road. The canopy is 42 metres and cantilevers 6.
A waiting hall with fixed timber benches along the glazing and people seated at distance
The waiting hall, forty minutes before a sailing.
A terminal is only itself for about twenty minutes either side of a sailing. The rest of the day it is a very good roof over nothing at all.
A glazed boarding bridge with one traveller walking away from camera
The boarding bridge. Glazed both sides, which is rarer than it should be.
The roof structure from below with laminated timber beams fanning out
The roof from underneath. This is the only place it can be seen properly.

The timber roof was the reason for the commission and the hardest thing in the building to photograph. It is beautiful from directly beneath and almost invisible from anywhere else, so most of the four visits went on finding the two standpoints where it reads at the same time as the water does. The frame from the boat, on the last visit, is the one that answered it.

The junction where a timber soffit meets the glazed facade head in sunlight
Soffit to facade head. A 40mm shadow gap, and the reason the roof floats.
The terminal seen from the water on a bright day reading as one calm horizontal
From the 11:20, on the fourth visit.