PROJECT REPORT: COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS 39


Sometimes a ceiling is not where you’d want it, or there’s a column in the middle of a space you wish wasn’t there.” “It’s definitely a harder road. There’s more risks, more issues that are hard to foresee, but the results speak for themselves.”


Overcoming the timber stigma Beyond the restrictive areas of the site, a number of other challenges had to be addressed by the team. In the early stages of the project, the pandemic caused significant disruption: “It was tough through Covid, restricting work across the board. The CLT structure was a great help here though. Brought in from offsite, and able to be assembled onsite by a small team, it worked really well in the situation.” Despite its benefits here however, the use of timber itself provided some issues. Though arguably unfounded – with evidence showing mass timber can be safer in a fire than steel in some cases (wood


ADF NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023


burning slowly and predictably, and charred timber even helping to protect and insulate the unburnt wood beneath) – fears around building taller structures from timber have arguably intensified in the UK post-Grenfell. Studio RHE believes strongly in the use of timber however, and as such was more than prepared to fight for it, “trying to use as much as possible” in all their projects, despite the targeting of timber in the wake of Grenfell.


“Before we started onsite, the regulations were changing very quickly, especially around insulation and fire. We of course had a real rigour with all the fire legislation decisions, however, how we interfaced between the materials, how each would perform, which soon allayed any concerns.” “The main problem at the moment seems to be the insurance,” says Foster, “which I believe has set the industry back, when really timber structures are a remarkable solution.”


In the face of these challenges, the WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK


CLT BENEFITS The lightweight CLT structure of the new upper floors was a great help during the pandemic, being built offsite and assembled onsite by a small team


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