One of the UK’s best known, and highest profile architects gave timber in construction a ringing endorsement during a seminar at the Built Environment exhibition last week.
Speaking at ‘Innovation in Timber Architecture’, an event co-sponsored by the Nordic Timber Council, Wood for Good and Building Design magazine, architect and TV presenter Maxwell Hutchinson said that wood had too often been relegated to the position of an ancillary building material. It’s role was either decorative and incidental or, if it was used structurally, it was ‘hidden away’.
‘Now there is a plethora of new players starting to use timber in a very different, central way in construction – and not before time,’ Mr Hutchinson told the audience of around 100 architects, builders and journalists.
He added that architects urgently needed to know more about the technical properties and possible applications of timber and timber products.
‘It’s easy to get carried away by the romanticism of using something that grows naturally in the forest, but it’s a serious intelligent, flexible material that needs as much technical understanding as concrete, steel and glass.’
Also speaking at the seminar, architect Jon Broome said that with the concept of ‘sustainable development embedded in public policy’, the way is open for timber to make a much bigger impact in UK building.
He also said that next year’s Building Regulations changes put timber into play, using illustrations of a number of buildings making extensive use of solid wood, glulam, LVL, and other timber sheet materials to highlight how they meet stipulations on insulation, cold bridging and vapour control.
