Featuring an unusual multi-level design, the facility is named for the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research’s director emeritus Bryant Bannister and is considered as the world’s first laboratory dedicated to tree-ring research.

The Bryant Bannister Tree-Ring Building will incorporate the Mathematics East building. A ‘tree trunk’-like structure will be featured on the ground floor housing public exhibit space and a multipurpose room that will serve as an auditorium and as a teaching lab. The canopy above the structure will feature two floors of laboratory and office space. These upper floors will be wider than the floor beneath, evoking the idea of a tree canopy that provides shade to the ground below.

The outer shell of the canopy will be a screen on the east, west and south sides that will minimise heat input to the building. The screen is designed to move slightly, evoking the rustling of a tree in the wind. The north side of the building will be uncovered, providing natural light for the building and a view toward the mountains.

The new building’s first-floor exhibit hall will also showcase the two-tonne, 10-foot-diameter cross-section of a giant sequoia given to Douglass in the 1930s by the superintendent of Sequoia National Park. The basement of the Mathematics East building, which currently houses the lab’s collections of bristlecone pine and sequoia, the shop and some lab space, will be renovated. The lab’s archaeological samples, currently in the West Stadium, will then be relocated to the Mathematics East basement.

The new construction will add 17,300 square feet of usable space, which is about 7,000 square feet more than the space the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research is currently using in the West Stadium. These portions of the Bryant Bannister Tree-Ring Building are scheduled for completion in late 2012, which would also be the 75th year of the lab.

In later stages, a modern, climate-controlled archive will be built in the Mathematics East building to house the lab’s extensive collection of wood samples, ranging from pencil-thin cores of trees to seven-foot-diameter cross-sections of giant sequoias. The collection is estimated to contain more than two million individual pieces of wood. Once complete, the new archive will allow the lab to double the amount of wood samples in the collection.

The lab recently received a $425,000 grant from the National Park Service and National Endowment for the Humanities’ Save America’s Treasures Program. The funds will be used to purchase mechanical-compact shelving units to store the collection.

The building is also designed to meet or exceed the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver standards. The new construction along with the renovation of the Mathematics East basement is funded by a $9 million private donation from Agnese Nelms Haury.

The UA alumni team designed the UA’s Meinel Optical Sciences Expansion earlier, which received a 2007 American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Honor Award for Architecture and has been named as one of Arizona’s 18 Greatest Architectural Achievements.

The facility was housed in ‘temporary quarters’ under the University of Arizona’s football stadium for 75 years.