this week the UK’s biggest school building to date using cross-laminated structural wood panels was opened. And hopefully auguring even better for the use of the material in this country, in cutting the ribbon for the St John Fisher School in Peterborough, the Roman Catholic bishop of East Anglia also gave the building his blessing.
The architects for the school were GSS, but the real architects for the use of the timber panel were structural engineers Ramboll Whitbybird (RW) who persuaded the client to switch to the material from concrete and brick. What swung the argument, said RW design director Simon Smith, was the fact that using wood represented an embodied CO2 cut for the building of 300 tonnes.
Mr Smith is evangelical about the use of cross-laminated panels and RW is now upping the ante with it again in the new Norwich Academy. While St John Fisher used 1,000m³ of the material, this will use 3,000m³, once more supplied by KLH of Austria.
There’s no doubt about it in Mr Smith’s mind – engineered wood in particular, but also timber in general, are set to play an increasingly important role in an increasingly eco-conscious UK building sector. And this was underlined at the Ecobuild sustainable construction show this week, where wood products and timber-based building systems were more prominent than ever.
Which brings us to the UK timber sector training body the Institute of Wood Science (IWSc) which is now looking to secure its future by merging with the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. With the rising uptake of advanced engineered timber products and use of wood in ever more demanding applications, it is widely agreed that education and training in the timber trade and, consequently a body like the IWSc, are more important than ever.
Projects like the St John Fisher School and Norwich Academy underline timber’s potential in the UK. But the fear is that if the UK timber industry does not have the skills and knowledge to exploit it, others will.
