Timbmet group chief executive Simon Fineman has been elected to the TRADA board.
Mr Fineman, who has been with Timbmet since the early 1990s, said the timber trade needed to become more innovative and that needed investment in research and development.
“As one of the largest independent companies in the industry, we also believe it is important that we support the trade bodies that make a positive and measurable contribution to the industry’s future,” he said.
Architects Craig White and Prof Mark Swenarton have also been elected to TRADA’s board.
Craig White founded White Design with fellow director Linda Farrow in 1998, specialising in low energy, environmentally-friendly buildings. He said: he looked forward to contributing to TRADA’s work. “I am passionate about convincing the construction industry that, as one of the few renewable materials available to us, timber will have a much larger role to play in the new low carbon economy.”
Mr White is a Carbon Trust Design Advice consultant, a member of Building Services Research and Information Association’s expert panel on the impact of climate change on the construction industry; and an assessor for Building Integrated Photo Voltaics for the DTI. He sits on the South West Design Review Panel of Creating Excellence and is a consultant to the Steel Construction Institute on low energy, naturally ventilated steel construction.
He is also senior lecturer and deputy award leader at the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the West of England, and visiting tutor at the London School of Economics for its MSc programme in City Design & Social Science.
Prof Swenarton is head of Oxford Brookes University’s Department of Architecture. He was co-founder/publishing editor of Architecture Today, from 1989-2005 and co-founder/ publishing editor of EcoTech, from 2000-2005. In 2004 he chaired the Royal Academy of Arts’ Critics Forum.
