38 | Sector Focus: Timber in Construction
SUMMARY
■ The building used as many James Jones products as possible
■ It includes office space, meeting rooms and kitchen facilities
■ Douglas fir was used extensively in the interior
■ The architect was Konishi Gaffney SHOWCASES TIMBER FLAGSHIP SITE James Jones & Sons recently completed a new visitor building at its flagship Lockerbie site
The Lockerbie site is the showcase sawmill within the James Jones Group. It is the largest single site sawmill complex in the UK and the most technically advanced. As such, pre-pandemic, Lockerbie received a high number of visitors – including small groups of customer visits, customer training courses, academic institutions and industry events. The idea for the building recognised the need to provide increased office accommodation, better visitor facilities, and the opportunity to host on-site training courses and industry meetings, which previously had to be conducted offsite. The brief for the building was part functional and part aspirational. At a functional level, there was a requirement to provide office accommodation for up to 10 staff, a meeting room capable of holding up to 30 people theatre style, with the flexibility
to hold classroom sessions and industry meetings and, in addition, a smaller meeting room, kitchen facilities and a reception area for visitors.
The building should obviously have a high timber content, using as much James Jones’s product as possible. It had to provide a view across the Lockerbie site allowing visitors the opportunity to see the sawmill in operation; it should have a low carbon footprint from a combination of a high embodied carbon figure, a low energy heating and ventilation system and high levels of insulation. The design ethos was to be stylish and striking, but at the same time thoughtful and not grandiose.
James Jones & Sons held a design competition between two architectural firms and the winning team was Konishi Gaffney from Edinburgh, led by Kieran Gaffney.
The completed building’s structure acts as a demonstration project, almost entirely erected from James Jones & Sons own products with an approach to minimising the use of steel and maximising timber. Loadbearing glulam beams were used throughout the building, while an unprocessed tree trunk provides loadbearing support to the backbone of the building; a nod to the timber processing cycle. The building takes the form of two offset pitched volumes: a single storey office wing to the north and a two-storey wing to the south, which houses the reception, meeting rooms and the conference space above. A simple, unheated, glass link building connects the new building to the old office. The first floor is raised to give panoramic views across the timber yard and over the constant stream of unprocessed logs to the mill, which is directly below this space.
TTJ | July/August 2021 |
www.ttjonline.com
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