Summary
• AHEC’s red oak wave in London received US$2m-worth of publicity.
• A current project is evaluating use of laminated US hardwood.
• AHEC’s work with students has a new technical focus.
• A London student project focuses on LCA.
The American red oak Timber Wave was a learning curve for everyone involved, the architect – structural and timber engineers, but perhaps most of all the chief author of the project, The American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC). In fact, the latter says the lessons the project taught are helping reshape its international marketing and educational strategy for the use of US hardwoods in construction, manufacture and design.
Showcase ventures, like the Wave, have formed part of AHEC’s approach for a while. In 2008, for instance, it worked with architect David Adjaye on the creation of his tulipwood pavilion, built for the London Design Festival (LDF). This was followed in 2009 by collaboration with designer Sebastian Wrong on his “bench press” seating for the Victoria & Albert Museum, also in tulipwood. Like these, the aim with Timber Wave was to create visual impact, and raise awareness of the aesthetic and design potential of American hardwood generally and, in this case, red oak in particular. In fact, it created a splash like no previous AHEC project.
Comprising a 12m-high spiralling lattice Arch made of hundreds of sections of laminated timber, the Wave stood outside the main entrance of the Victoria & Albert museum throughout the LDF last September. It was seen by tens of thousands of people and garnered media coverage worth over US$2m in equivalent advertising space.
According to AHEC European director David Venables, however, the Wave was not just about looks. It created significant technical ripples too. Structural engineer Arup and architect Amanda Levete of AL_A said it opened their eyes to the structural potential of timber, and agreed with timber contractor Cowley Timberwork, that it broke new ground technically. This education process, said Mr Venables, could be lasting, not just for the project participants, but the wider market.
Structure not sculpture
“What brought it home to me was when the Wave was described as a sculpture and Amanda Levete reacted with ‘it’s not a sculpture, it’s a structure’,” he said. “It underlined that it not only created a unique story to inspire anyone wanting to design with wood, but a practical, technical story for building with it.”
He stressed that previous projects have not been without a strong practical element. The tulipwood Pavilion, for instance, involved innovative work with Osmose on treatment to make the species suitable for outdoor use. But the Wave took things to a new level and distilled AHEC’s thoughts on future initiatives.
“We’ll continue to do inspirational projects for the architectural and design community, but we learned from the Wave that the best route forward is also to include a very strong technical aspect – it’s got to be about education and inspiration,” he said. “In fact, we’re already turning down approaches to support projects that don’t fit our strategy and take the technical story forward.”
One new venture that definitely does do the latter, he added, is a collaboration with a leading structural engineer to produce and use laminated structural components with American hardwood.
“Most people still think of these products in terms of softwood, but a lot of the technology involved could equally well be applied to hardwoods,” said Mr Venables. “The aim is not to substitute softwood. We’re saying to engineers and architects, this can be part of your structural portfolio. It creates a different aesthetic, and may enable you to use less timber overall due to hardwood’s different structural strength.”
The message that hardwood could sometimes be a more cost-efficient structural material than softwood has also been delivered to AHEC architectural and engineering seminars in Spain and Italy.
Another core focus for AHEC has long been communicating the American hardwood message to the building professionals of tomorrow, architecture and design students worldwide. Now it is turning up the technical temperature here too.
In January, for instance, it ran a competition, called “Wood Stock”, for French and Belgian architectural and design students to create a stand-alone product, a functional interior or small home extension incorporating American hardwoods. The key was that these had to be technically feasible, with the 15 shortlisted entries made into prototypes of models and displayed at the Maison & Objet show in Paris.
The following month, AHEC ran a series of hardwood structure workshops for architectural students at IE University in Madrid. The guest lecturer was one of the foremost professionals in the field, Arup’s UK wood specialist Andrew Lawrence, and 20 students consequently opted to take an AHEC-sponsored timber module and will create conceptual designs which will go on public display.
Now attention is being turned to the UK, with perhaps the most challenging and innovative student project yet.
Chair design
Product design undergrads at the Royal College of Arts have been challenged to design a chair or seating in American hardwoods under the guidance of Sebastian Wrong and fellow furniture makers/designers Luke Hughes and Sean Sutcliffe of Benchmark. The results will be prototyped for display during the 2012 LDF.
Designing seating that works, said Mr Venables, is demanding enough, given the required mix of “performance, style and ergonomics”. But there’s even more to the project.
AHEC has commissioned sustainability consultancy PE International to undertake a major life cycle analysis (LCA) for American hardwoods, looking at their cradle-to-grave environmental impacts. Preliminary data from this will be combined with analysis of the energy and materials’ “inputs and outputs” in making the seating and the result will be an LCA profile of each design. Guided by PE International, the students will also learn about the whole LCA process and how to build it into their work.
“The aim is to highlight that LCA will be an increasingly significant element in manufacture and design,” said Mr Venables. “It will also underline that timber’s aesthetic and performance appeal is underpinned by unique environmental strengths. It really joins the dots of everything AHEC is doing.”
Parallel to the RCE project, AHEC is working with Benchmark, Aberrant Architecture and Wallpaper magazine to design two pub tables in ash and walnut and maple and cherry for the Milan furniture fair. Full LCA profiles of these will also be developed, which will then help build architectural and manufacturing modeling tools.
And AHEC’s technical wave rolls on.
“We’ll never stop being passionate about promoting timber,” said Mr Venables, “but we also recognise the need to apply even more science, technology and research to substantiate our arguments.”
