Exemplary projects in mass timber: Leadership made visible

Guest editorial by Peter Fisher , Director of Bennetts Associates , for our July newsletter 'Built by Nature Circular'

If the world is to avoid a catastrophic climate crisis, all palatable scientific scenarios require not only huge carbon emission reductions, but also carbon removals. Biogenic-based construction has a clear role to play in achieving both. Forests are not optimal places to store carbon, whereas buildings can be – a realisation reflected in the UN’s decision last summer to include biogenic construction within its list of carbon removal technologies.

Of late, a key focus of ours at Bennetts Associates has been designing large buildings using mass timber. The challenges of timber construction are particularly acute in the UK, in part due to a lack of any recent tradition of large-scale timber construction. This doesn’t mean timber can’t be used, only that currently every major project is in effect bespoke. What is sorely needed are standardised details and technical protocols that the wider industry is familiar with.

This is why the work supported and funded by Built by Nature, such as the recently released ‘Commercial Timber Buildings Guidebook,’ is so important in formulating more generic and practical solutions that can drive the whole industry forward.

Exemplar projects also have a significant role in moving the dial, generating awareness, and promoting broader industry confidence --witness the attention garnered by Waugh Thistleton’s Black and White Building. The importance of a committed client setting an example and nudging the mainstream in the right direction cannot be underestimated. Landsec, for example, has been a superbly committed client for Timber Square in London, a 35,000m2 hybrid timber structure currently on-site, proudly designed by Bennetts.

As a result of more exemplar projects coming online and increasingly standardised details, we are convinced that mass timber construction will soon be mainstream in the UK, something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. And we are now researching materials such as straw and hemp (as binders in clay-based blocks), with their added advantage of a one-year carbon cycle, rather than the decades associated with timber.

At the moment, it seems unlikely that those materials will reach a mass, mainstream market any time soon. But I would have made the same observation about mass timber only recently.