6
NEWS
Jerry Tate of Tate & Co Architects put the case for “super-local timber sourcing”
The panel for the event included Alex de Rijke, founding director of dRMM Studio, Anthony Thistleton, founder and director of Waugh Thistleton; Jerry Tate, director of Tate + Co Architects, Rory Bergin, partner, Sustainable Futures at HTA Design; Jess Hrivnak, practice technical adviser (sustainability) at RIBA; and Chris Gaze, sustainability consultant at the STA. Jerry Tate provided some genuinely inspiring examples of designing and engineering innovative forms using timber in a series of award-winning projects which led to sustained strategic relationships with clients. These ranged from the curvaceous Eden Project education building he worked on at Grimshaw that mimicked nature using the Fibbonaci sequence in timber, to the CLT-built Cranleigh Preparatory School building designed by his current practice. Tate admitted that designers face a conundrum around transport and embodied carbon impact, as performance specifi cations increase for timber builds. “As buildings have got more effi cient, components have to come from further afi eld; the embodied carbon is massive.” As a result, Tate & Co has been exploring projects using “super-local timber sourcing,” including larch and chestnut poles. Tate told the audience that from designing over 20 timber houses, the practice had learned that they “always have to pre-tender the timber frame before we get the main contractor on board, so that we know what the structural solution is. It makes us understand where to put things like DPCs, vapour barriers and breather
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK
membranes behind the cladding.” The STA’s Chris Gaze presented research data from the organisation around the challenges of reducing whole-life carbon, and build quality challenges in some masonry-built schemes, including the Project 80 ‘eco’ social housing scheme in Handsworth, Birmingham, which had stringent targets but a performance gap on air permeability. Gaze reported the as-built score was around 2.5 N/m2 – versus a design score of 1.5 N/m2. He added that the insulation which had been inserted to address detailing issues around windows added “£2900 per house, plus a further £2900 for polymer spray insulation.” Despite the challenges around performance and long term embodied carbon, Gaze asserted: “The carbon emissions we are making now are much more important the ones we may make later,” due to the severity of the climate crisis we face in the short-term. Rory Bergin of HTA told the audience
that “there are a lot of places in the industry where we don’t have the expertise [on timber]; the industry is not fi t for purpose.” He added: “We are in a weird place in the UK on sustainable policy, if you go outside London there is an absence of policy.” Bergin added: “Buildings have had to be demolished due to personnel changes, and we aren’t assessing everything through all the lenses,” when it came to designing robustly using timber. He saw potential for the volume housebuilding sector’s to engage with the Timber Roadmap agenda: “It will be very interesting to see how far we can go
The STA’s Chris Gaze offered performance gap data
with volume housebuilding. Once you take them out of their ‘family’ pattern books, you can go surprisingly far.” Bergin concluded however that despite the “sweet spot” for timber in the residential sector being “between 18 metres and low-rise housing,” the “large corporations are very risk averse at the moment, and not looking at fi ve-six storey buildings.”
Alex de Rijke of drMM Architects presented several excellent timber structures, including the beautifully simple Maggie’s Centre at Oldham Hospital which surrounds an existing tree with an elevated, “weightless” timber cabin. And Anthony Thistleton gave an impassioned plea for a more open-minded approach to high-rise timber, showing how workplace schemes such as the Black & White Building in east London had given corporate clients major returns on investment. This was against the backdrop that “however green a client is, they are never green enough to pay 50% more,” and he also asserted that architects “have to be absolutely ruthless about design effi ciency,” adding “if they want to build in timber, they have to design in timber,” rather than substituting with timber. Andrew Carpenter added that the Structural Timber Association was “showing leadership” using its STA Assure quality assurance scheme for products which “provides confi dence to the sector in terms of the whole supply chain.” He said: “We are putting a lot of emphasis on skills and particularly onsite competency, including a new installer training scheme.”
ADF JULY/AUGUST 2024
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
