The roll call of Craig White’s professional responsibilities is evidence that he practises his philosophy of "always say yes to opportunity".
As co-founder and director of architecture practice White Design; chair of Wood for Good; director of TRADA; senior lecturer at the University of the West of England (UWE); and most recently chief executive of eco-developer and social entrepreneur Connolly & Callaghan Group (C&C) Craig has certainly taken opportunity where it’s arisen.
The approach means his career as an architect focused on sustainability hasn’t followed a set path, and he likens it to the road less travelled in Robert Frost’s poem "The Road not Taken".
"In life there are forks in the road; the one that looks easy to take and the most travelled by is the obvious to take because the risk would appear to be lower, but the one covered in brambles and nettles looks more interesting. I have the stings and scratches to prove I’ve taken the one less travelled by saying yes first and worrying about the consequences later," he said.
Craig was born in Scotland but his father’s career as an engineer in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy, working on jets and vessels such as the aircraft carrier the Ark Royal, meant the family relocated many times. The first move was to Portsmouth when Craig was seven and several towns later the family settled in Cardiff when Craig was in his mid teens.
On leaving school he wanted to study geology but the necessary cram course in chemistry didn’t work, and he left at the end of the first year. For the next two years he worked in a bakery by day and as a bass guitarist by night.
With some encouragement from his father, Craig decided to give university another go. "The university’s compendium of subjects was in alphabetical order and I didn’t get passed A – A for agriculture was a no, A for architecture was a yes; it really grabbed me," said Craig.
After completing his undergraduate degree at Cardiff University and a post-graduate diploma at the Architectural Association in London Craig graduated into the recession and construction downturn of the early 1990s. He accepted a friend’s invitation to go to Germany where the two established a practice in the newly united country. Within six months the fledgling business was employing 10 people.
"It was stratospheric growth," said Craig. "It was a case of being in the right place at the right time."
Arriving back in the UK he settled in Bristol where his partner Linda Farrow, an environmentalist, worked for the National Rivers Authority and the newly formed Environment Agency, and Craig took a job with the architecture practice Feilden Clegg (now Feilden Clegg Bradley) in Bath. The firm is known for its focus on sustainability and while there Craig was the project architect for the BRE’s Environmental Building, an early low energy building and itself a facility for sustainable design.
Craig and Linda then decided that if they were serious about sustainability they should set up their own practice and so, White Design was born.
The practice’s first project – Velux UK’s sales and marketing office in Kettering – was a signpost for White Design’s sustainability philosophy. The timber-rich building features a glulam-frame, timber floors, cladding and cedar shingles.
Since then White Design has developed a portfolio of low energy buildings with a strong emphasis on timber. It includes the glulam-framed Kingsmead School in Cheshire, which has become a model for environmental school design, and projects using the ModCell building system of timber frame and straw bale structural panels.
When designing a low energy building, material choice is key, and timber is an obvious choice for Craig. It’s not to say he won’t use other materials, depending on their environmental provenance and performance, but timber’s carbon-capturing credentials give it a head start.
But for Craig it’s more than building with timber; it’s about building with carbon.
"A lot of a building’s impact arises out of material choices. You can recycle concrete, steel and aluminium and try to make them efficient but timber is amazing because it’s actually made of captured carbon," he said.
"If buildings are going to become zero carbon through energy efficiency then what we make them out of and the carbon embodied or emitted as a result becomes a bigger issue."
With any project, Craig and his team apply systems thinking, which is more than just designing a building for a space or a specific need.
"Systems thinking says everything is interdependent and interconnected and if you don’t acknowledge that, things can go wrong," Craig explained. "A classic example is architects will say ‘let’s design the building in glass because it’s transparent, open and democratic’ but in a non-systems way you’ve ended-up designing a greenhouse. It will overheat, you then need excessive energy to cool it when it shouldn’t have been designed to overheat in the first place."
This systems thinking led to the development of ModCell, a prefabricated timber frame and straw bale system that has been used for projects ranging from houses to schools.
"People think straw bale is about keeping warm in cold climates but it’s not just that; it’s about heat management. Straw is reluctant to move heat through it and we’re doing work in Spain where we need to keep the heat out and in Scotland where we worry about keeping the heat in the building. Straw works just as well in both climates keeping us warm in winter and cool in summer," said Craig.
Now C&C Group will build 200 ModCell houses a year in Bristol and the south-west and the longer-term plan is to repeat the model for other areas in the UK.
"As a developer we are part of the UK’s Custom Build Programme, where we will help communities to build their own neighbourhoods by building super insulated, reasonably priced, nicely designed, low energy houses made from carbon," said Craig.
Last summer in Bristol ModCell put a terrace of straw bale homes for sale on the open market – a world first, said Craig. In addition, European research funding enabled the homes to be Q-Mark certified which allows the high street banks, such as Nationwide and Santander, to offer mortgages on the properties.
The project received attention from the mainstream media, including the BBC’s One Show, and potential buyers. There were 400 enquiries for the seven properties, many no doubt attracted by the high energy efficiency which means the heating bills are just 10% of the norm.
Drawing together the threads of carbon, communities and custom build, and his roles as architect, social entrepreneur and Wood for Good chair, Craig recognises that a new move in housebuilding offers a massive opportunity for the timber industry.
Under the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Act 2015, which comes into effect in April, local authorities must publish a register of land they have available for custom or self-builders. The government’s annual target for the initiative is 125,000 homes, at the same time it is advocating greater use of prefabricated systems. Craig describes it as "the biggest single business opportunity in housing since the second world war" – and the Custom Build Programme is not open to conventional volume housebuilders.
"This is a £32.5bn housing market and the timber industry should come forward with solutions," he said.
Wood for Good will raise awareness of timber and "get a tide rising", but it is the timber industry that must create the solutions and, at the moment, he believes it’s not yet taking full advantage of the opportunity.
"People want to buy housing solutions from the timber industry but the industry doesn’t yet fully understand what is meant by a solution," said Craig.
The answer, he says, is to vertically integrate the supply chain, from forest owner to product manufacturer. "You’re then out of commodity market pricing, trying to be cheaper than anybody else."
It also changes the market dynamics from push to pull. "With a building solution the market starts pulling it through because by definition it’s solving more than the individual component parts could – and that’s what the UK housing crisis needs," said Craig.
The home-grown industry could also find a solutions niche rather than trying to compete against imported engineered timber products.
"There’s no point making CLT in Scotland that tries to compete with the Austrians because they have the equivalent of timber sausage-making machines that do this at volume; we have small-scale specialist presses," said Craig. "We need to add value so it becomes a system that works for the UK market. That might be a particular CLT that meets particular needs, for example high quality finished thin CLT that could be used in prefabricated system builds for the Custom Build Programme; it might then become a solution."
Rather than "head butting with imported timber on price" home-grown timber should take advantage of its uniqueness.
"Take Volkswagen, which includes the brands VW, SEAT, Audi, Skoda and Porsche.
They all share the same engineering platform but buyers express distinct preferences about what they are prepared to pay. It is as much about your perception of yourself as it is about the engineering. Timber should be the new engineering platform for the housing industry. The brands and their price points still need to be conceived of and delivered," said Craig.
While being an advocate for timber, he disregards arguments about the relative environmental merits of concrete, steel and timber as "a waste of time", and acknowledges that every material, sourced and used wisely, has its place.
"We will still use copper for electricity, aluminium for window frames and we will still need concrete," he said. "I can’t bury timber underground yet but there aren’t many materials that are as versatile as timber and that’s its strength. We can form the sturdy turned leg of a table or a utilitarian roof truss, a beautifully engineered glulam, even clogs and the pencils we design with. Timber has multi platform uses yet to be scaled."
In addition to the environmental, aesthetic and versatility reasons to use timber, there’s also an economic argument. "Timber has huge potential as a carbon capture and storage solution.
Conventional carbon capture and storage solutions are expensive, demand new technology to do the capture, the captured carbon is often in the wrong place and needs to be transported to where it can be stored. Whereas carbon stored in timber in the built environment has utility; we can build with. In the built environment, the carbon is insured, maintained as a balance sheet item and, uniquely, increases in value over time.
That’s a completely investible proposition to encourage more people to use timber, not just to build homes but as a new form of carbon capture and storage that can bring carbon investment opportunities," said Craig.
And even more encouragingly, he believes "we’re only just discovering what we can do with timber".
Despite the number and range of professional roles Craig has he is very conscious of the need to have a good work/ life balance, although he admits that even that is something that has to be worked at.
When not designing, teaching or promoting timber he spends time with his family. Swimming is a regular Sunday morning activity and this year Craig and Linda are taking Ceroc, or modern jive, lessons. While he still has a bass guitar, he has passed the mantle of guitarist to their 10-year-old son Ruairidh.
With Craig aged 53 and taking up a new challenge as head of C&C Group, he and Linda have been mindful of ensuring the future for White Design and as part of succession planning a team of talented associates and directors is now leading the business. And whatever the future holds for Craig there’s little doubt he will continue to say yes to opportunity.
