Determination and self-motivation are words that come to mind when considering architect Peter Wilson’s career thus far.

Peter, who now heads up Timber Design Initiatives Ltd, is well known within the timber industry for his previous activity at Edinburgh Napier University – work that included steering research and development of new timber construction products and promoting the use of Scottish-grown timber.

His route to that point has seen him travel extensively and collaborate on architectural projects on a grand and truly international scale.

Peter grew up and went to school in Glasgow and has the then City Corporation’s careers office to thank for setting him on the right path. “I did all sorts of tests there and they said I should become an architect,” said Peter. “At 15 I had no idea what an architect was and thought it probably meant serving an apprenticeship in an office for umpteen years.” However, at the tender age of 17 he struck out on his own and went to London to study architecture, gaining a first degree at the North East London Polytechnic and his architectural diploma at the Polytechnic of Central London.

He funded his studies by working on construction sites during vacation periods and every spare penny was spent buying books on architecture and travelling to see buildings.

When studies ended in the late 70s he found work at a consortium of architectural and engineering companies in the UK, America, France and Greece called The Idea Centre.

The project the consortium was working on was demanding to say the least as it was tasked with building 32 towns in Saudi Arabia from scratch within two years. “The infrastructure and landscape work was carried out in the US whilst all the architectural design was produced in London.

I gradually found myself working between London and Athens and every so often I’d be sent out to Saudi Arabia to work on the design of specific projects that ranged from apartment buildings and houses to embassies and theatres.”

Looking back he acknowledges he was thrown in at the deep end, working in detailed urban design in a completely different culture. “Everything I had learned up to that point hadn’t prepared me for thinking about Islamic architecture and I worked really hard at it. I did a lot of homework and got to understand much more about the religion and philosophy of Islam and their applications in architecture.”

Having crammed “10 years of experience into two years” Peter moved on and joined Professor Doug Clelland, one of his PCL tutors, to work on projects in what was then West Berlin. “Doug was very involved with the latest International Building Exhibition (IBA) that had been held periodically in the city since the second world war. A lot of international architects were competing for projects to rebuild the Kreuzberg district, which was still largely bomb damaged from the war.” The practice secured the project to build part of the Gehörlösencentrum (Institute for the Deaf) near Checkpoint Charlie. “It finally went on site in the late 80s. It was an intense time because of all the political toing and fro-ing in West Berlin and provided a very different learning curve. The rather elementary German I’d managed to pick up at school was employed a bit more than I expected.”

Subsequently the pair focused their attention on Glasgow, their home town, it having been awarded the title of European City of Culture 1990. The idea for a major exhibition emerged and the arches under Glasgow’s Central Station were gutted to make way for ‘Glasgow’s Glasgow’, a 65,000ft2 exhibition about the city and its relationship to the world. “We produced a masterplan and asked about 20 firms of architects to design different parts of the project. This meant me project managing all of the design and construction and effectively spending every working day underground for about six months whilst it was being built.”

On the back of ‘Glasgow’s Glasgow’, Peter was invited to design a major exhibition for the Madrid City of Culture celebrations, which were to take place in 1992 and spent 18 months travelling to and from the Spanish capital. Ultimately, however, all available sponsorship was sucked into the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville Expo, both of which were also taking place in 1992, and the exhibition didn’t happen. However, it did lead to an invitation from Edinburgh Council to lead its bid for the title of City of Architecture and Design 1999.

“Between Madrid in 1992 and the end of 1994 I worked flat out on the bid but in the end Glasgow was awarded the title by the Arts Council of England,” said Peter. “But having put so much work into it and with a lot of projects lined up we decided to make some of these things happen anyway. We set up ‘Manifesto’, a ‘“guerilla” festival of architecture and design in Edinburgh that included around 70 different events, and was held for two weeks every October between 1995 and 1998, after which the official Glasgow City of Architecture and Design 1999 celebrations took attention on these subjects to another level.”

In 1995 Peter was approached by Londonbased architecture practice Benson + Forsyth to become site architect on their design for the new Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

“As an architect, it’s the kind of project you’d bite someone’s hand off to be involved in,” said Peter. “I was resident architect for almost four years and was incredibly fortunate to be involved on such a fantastic project and to work with such a talented team of people.”

By the early 2000s Peter had launched a magazine called Arca about architecture in Scotland and was also writing extensively about architecture for newspapers and magazines.

This was combined with organising a wide range of exhibitions and conferences, particularly around the possibility of creating an architectural policy for Scotland, a subject that developed momentum and resulted in one of the first policy implementations of the newly devolved Scottish Parliament.

Around the same time, Edinburgh Napier University’s design department had called on Peter’s assistance in the development of a Masters course in Exhibition Interpretation.

This established a relationship with the University that led to him being asked to join its newly created Centre for Timber Engineering as an assistant director. His role encompassed marketing, business development and publishing and these tasks continued until the Centre became part of the University’s new Forest Products Research Institute, a change that produced three new timber research centres including one headed by Peter – the Wood Studio – with its focus on innovation in the use of timber in architecture and construction.

Peter is clear about the many positive things achieved by Edinburgh Napier’s outstanding team of engineering and wood science experts on behalf of the industry during the 13 years he worked there.

From a personal perspective he is proud of the work done by his own centre as a result of securing a £1.5m European Region Development Fund grant (with match funding from Forestry Commission Scotland, Scottish Enterprise, Confor and Wood for Good) to facilitate the research and development of 20+ new products, processes and construction systems using Scottish-grown timber.

Unquestionably the largest project undertaken was to produce cross-laminated timber (CLT) from Scottish-grown material. “I’d already been exploring the production of CLT for about three years (and received Edinburgh Napier’s Principal’s Award for this work) and our knowledge of the Scottish forest resource and the properties of the wood available indicated there was enough good quality timber available (over and above existing uses) to underpin a large scale manufacturing facility for at least 25 years.”

“We had a Housing Expo in Scotland in 2010 and five of the 55 houses built were of CLT construction. Scottish government ministers visited the site and thought the product was fantastic and wanted it manufactured in Scotland as soon as possible. So some additional funding was directed to the Institute to enable the necessary research and development work to be carried out.”

Three years of product development followed, with research into Sitka spruce, larch, Douglas fir, Scots pine and – “a couple of wildcards” – hemlock and Lawson cypress. The research concluded that C16 Sitka spruce – the most plentiful resource – satisfied Eurocode 5 standards, paving the way for the private sector to take the next step and invest in production. Some time has lapsed since the R&D project was completed, but there is now evidence of movement on idea of a UK based, commercially viable manufacturing facility.

All of the work described above, plus other projects too numerous to mention, culminated in Edinburgh Napier University being awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in 2015, the most prestigious award available to UK universities.

This seemed to be a good point to move on as by this time Peter had several other large projects he wanted to see completed that didn’t fit easily within the constraints of a modern university, so he left to set up Timber Design Initiatives. “It’s a step onwards and upwards for me from the Wood Studio’s more academic remit in terms of research and industry-related activity,” said Peter. “I see a lot of the company’s future work being more widely international.”

Timber Design Initiatives has three interrelated areas of activity:

  • Education – through the delivery of structured, rather than ad-hoc, CPD. Recent work has included a series of conferences for Wood for Good around the use of timber in new housing design, with the next event “the Custom Build Timber House” due to take place in Bristol on October 27;
  • Innovation – involving liaison with industry on developing ideas, assessing their commercial potential and bringing them into mainstream production, activities he anticipates being carried out in collaboration with the recently created Construction Scotland Innovation Centre; And
  • Demonstration – which includes getting newly developed products into construction projects where they can be seen in use and tested post-completion.

In this latter regard Peter had already been instrumental in creating the Scottish Scenic Routes initiative that has been supported by the Scottish Government to create a series of high quality viewpoints and installations designed by young architects along some of the tourist trails in Scotland. Aside from working on a 10-year strategy to extend the initiative, he’s now looking to create other demonstration projects that “take more great ideas and products into built reality.” He remains fascinated by what is going on in the wider world of timber architecture and design.

“My motivation now is to communicate the possibilities to construction professionals so they become more confident and creative in the use of timber.

This in turn will allow the technology to be developed in new ways and help to deliver new forms of architecture, engineering and construction.”

Peter’s “unashamed passion” for timber means he has little free time and he’s never felt a particular need for a hobby. He admits, however, that Maisie, a miniature schnauzer acquired a few years ago at his wife’s Alison’s insistence when she took early retirement has had a “transformational” effect on home life. “I take Maisie for a long walk in the morning and it’s the most therapeutic part of the day.”

Aside from canine constitutionals, Peter continues to enjoy travelling both on holiday (northern Spain being a favourite destination for the Wilsons) and for work.

“I’ve had the good fortune to be regularly invited to speak at international conferences and if there’s an opportunity I try to add on a couple of days so I can look at the local architecture, museums and galleries. You get to meet some fantastically interesting people and learn so much all the time. I don’t know if there’s a word in English for it but the Japanese have one – ikigai – which I’m told roughly translates as ‘the reason you wake up every day’.”